Arran Fernandez, who hit headlines in 2001 for his mathematical prowess, set to become university's youngest student since 1773

At 15, most teenagers are struggling to get their heads around the algebra and equations of maths GCSE. Not Arran Fernandez.

Next month, he will become the youngest student at Cambridge University for 237 years – aged 15 and three months.

Arran, an only child who has been home schooled, will study maths at Cambridge, the youngest to attend the university since William Pitt the Younger was offered a place as a 14-year-old in 1773.

Arran first made headlines in 2001, aged five, when he gained the highest grade in the foundation maths paper. At the time he said he was considering becoming a lorry driver.

He has now decided he wants to be a research mathematician and find a solution to the Riemann hypothesis – the unsolved theory about the patterns of prime numbers that has baffled mathematicians for 150 years.

Fernandez will live with his father, Neil, in rented accommodation. He said he would miss his mother, Hilde, who will stay at the family home in Surrey and see her son at weekends and in university holidays.

The teenager plans to join the university's bird watching society and develop his interest in English literature.

"I'm excited about starting the course and advancing my knowledge of maths," he said. "It isn't the youngest bit that is so important to me – I am more interested in going to Cambridge than comparing myself with other people who go there."

He was not upset that he would be barred from the bar at the college that has offered him a place – Fitzwilliam College.

"I don't feel like I'm missing out on much. Even if I was 18, I wouldn't want to go out drinking," he said.

His parents said they were very proud of their son, who scored an A* in maths GCSE aged seven and has just achieved top grades in maths, further maths and physics A-level.

He will join the likes of Isaac Newton, who also studied at Cambridge, and Stephen Hawking, who like Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics there. But he will also be following the path of other child prodigies, some of whom have come to regret being separated from their peer group and starting university so early.

Sufiah Yusof achieved a place at St Hilda's College, Oxford University, in 1997, to study maths at the age of 13. But In 2001, she ran away after taking her final exam for the academic year. She was discovered working as a waitress in a Bournemouth internet cafe two weeks later, but refused to return home. She claimed her parents had made life difficult for her and lived with a foster family instead. She never finished her course.

In March 2008, a reporter for the News of the World found her advertising as a prostitute under the name Shilpa Lee. She is now said to be working as a social worker.

In 1985, Ruth Lawrence became Oxford University's youngest-ever maths graduate at 13. She had been tutored by her father. She is now a maths professor in Israel, married with two children and has said she would not want to do the same to her son.

Paul Chirico, a senior tutor at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, said Arran had achieved the conditions of his offer to read maths. "Fitzwilliam considers all applications to the college very carefully, regardless of background. Arran was assessed as part of this well-established process and his considerable academic potential was recognised." Children cannot live in student accommodation, because the university cannot carry out criminal record checks on all the other undergraduates.

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