An 11-year-old Swedish boy is attracting media attention around the world after helping his father solve a chemistry problem that had stumped him and his colleagues for years and getting his name published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Sven Hovmller, a professor in the department of materials and environmental chemistry at Stockholm University, knew his son, Linus Hovmller Zou, was a whiz at Sudoku and other number- and geometry-based puzzles so he asked him to help him come up with the geometric structure of a series of quasi-crystals known as pseudo-decagonal approximants.

"The day before, we had done some Sudokus, and I couldn't keep up with him," Hovmller told Carol Off, host of CBC Radio's As It Happens. "I just asked him this one Saturday morning; 'Would you like to sit down and have a look at this?' and he said. 'OK.'"

Hovmller and his colleagues had spent eight years using X-ray crystallography and electron diffraction to try to identify the atomic structures of a family of eight of the crystal-like compounds, only two of whose structures had been solved up to that point.

After years of staring at countless images of the compounds, Hovmller figured he could use a fresh perspective, and since the problem was less one of chemistry than geometry, he thought it was one his son, who was 10 at the time, could tackle.

"You don't need, really, any chemistry background to start working on this problem," Hovmller told As It Happens. "He has a fresh brain. He didn't know anything when he started. He could learn just enough to concentrate on the next step."

So, Linus and Hovmller sat down at the kitchen table and started playing with the patterns of the quasi-crystals. After two long days of hard work, they had identified the structures of four more of the compounds.

"Maybe the most remarkable [thing] wasn't that he sat down in the first place but that he didn't stand up and say. 'OK that's enough' after an hour or two," Hovmller said.

The father and son team's findings are published in the June 28 issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences).

Listen to Carol Off's interview with Hovmller by clicking on the player above.

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11-year-old boy helps solve chemistry puzzle