Mikhail Ali, a boy of three from the northern England town of Leeds, has become the youngest Briton to be admitted to Mensa, the so-called 'high IQ society.'

Mikhail was accepted in Mensa after his parents, second generation Bangladeshis, produced evidence from York University that he has an intelligence quotient of 137, which puts him in the top two percent of the population.

Mikhail, who loves maths, can already add together four-digit numbers, recite the alphabet (forwards as well as backwards), spell the names of all the children at his nursery and recite his two, 10 and 11 tables.

Not only that, he has just started elementary algebra and is able to do sums that incorporate negative numbers.

Mother Shamsun Ali, 26, who runs an Internet software company along with husband Tahir, said she realised Mikhail was special just after his second birthday. It was snowing and Shamsun asked her son to count the snowflakes.

"I expected him to get as far as 10 at the most. But he just kept going," Shamsun was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail, which ran a full-page profile of the boy Wednesday.

"I think he might have a photographic memory," she added. "We discovered the other day that he had memorised the numbers of all the channels on Sky - Sky Sports, Bravo, Paramount and so on. No matter which we picked, he knew its three-digit code."

Ironically, Mikhail's parents say they were actually worried about his intelligence when he was younger and took him to a health worker because he could only use two words - 'daddy' and 'baby' - at 18 months.

But when they introduced Mikhail to books - on the health worker's suggestion - they found him to be more interested in words than pictures.

Once Mikhail had quickly picked up alphabets and numbers, he was put through a series of tests by a York University psychologist who is studying the way in which reading skills are acquired.

Mikhail's score of 137 on the internationally-recognised Wechsler Pre-School and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) is higher than the 132 that Mensa says is the threshold of the top two percent.

Father Tahir said, "I think there must have been something exceptional in his genes - probably from his mother. We are not saying he is the world's cleverest child.

"But he is one in a hundred."