These days most students take the math course when they are high school freshmen — remember the quadratic formula? — but top-achieving students are sometimes offered the chance to take algebra a year earlier, in eighth grade.

Our high-school nightmares are graffitied with formulas and calculus and quadratic equations, panicked pop quizzes corrected with a harsh red pen.

One especially influential Indian mathematician was Brahmagupta, whose algebraic techniques could handle any quadratic equation.

“If all I find is that the extraterrestrials know quadratic equations, I’m going to be very disappointed,” Vakoch says.

The sixth graders at Khan Lab School, an independent school with an elementary campus in Palo Alto, Calif., were working on quadratic equations, graphing functions, Venn diagrams.