HOLMDEL, N.J. – If Allen Lin were an athlete, you would have heard of him by now.

If Allen Lin were a basketball or football player, his choice of college would be big news. Duke or North Carolina? USC or Michigan? But Allen is a blue-chip academic prospect, one of the best in the country.

So it’s M.I.T. or Stanford.

The best schools want him. And why not?

What Allen, a Holmdel High School senior, has done academically is so amazing, it borders on miraculous – and not in the sports-hyperbole sense of a buzzer-beater or last-second touchdown pass.

Truly amazing.

So much so, it takes someone like Allen Lin to explain it.

Allen has aced 13 of 13 Advanced Placement tests. AP courses are open to the brightest high school students, those ready to do college level work. If a student passes the AP test with a score of 3 or better, many colleges will advance the student credits.

Allen scored perfect 5s on the 13 tests he has taken so far in high school.

Jennifer Topiel, the director of public relations for the College Board that oversees the AP tests, said the feat is amazing on two fronts. First, in the aces. And second, in the volume.

“Of the seniors that graduated in 2006, only .02 percent took as many as 13 exams during their high school careers,” she said. “That’s not “aced.’ That’s just “took.”‘

Topiel also said that of the 2.3 million tests taken last year, only 310,000, or about 13.6 percent, were aced.

So what then, are the chances of one kid getting perfect scores on 13?

The question was asked as Allen, a tallish, slender young man dressed in blue jeans and a striped rugby shirt, sat in an empty lab at Holmdel High with his chemistry teacher and mentor, Josephine Blaha, a former researcher at Bell Labs.

With Blaha prodding him with her eyes to show off, Allen – better described as humble than shy – reluctantly solved the problem.

“You take 13.6 percent raised to the 13th power, times .02 percent,” said Allen, with less than a minute of thought, as he punched up the numbers on his calculator.

And what’s that?

“It’s a pretty high number,” he said, shielding the calculator. “But, of course, this is looking at it as random numbers only. This doesn’t take into the account the number of people who may have aced more than one test.”

What Allen was trying to do was downplay the fact that he defied 1 in 9.2 billion odds in acing 13 of 13 AP tests. What he was trying to say was that maybe, just maybe, there was a kid out there like him. Or, as they say in statistics, “allow for the possibility.”

But if there is, there aren’t many.

Jim Whaley of the Siemen’s Foundation, which just gave Allen its prestigious scholarship award, had never heard of such an accomplishment. Neither had Topiel.

“In 37 years of education I’ve never seen a kid with a mind like this,” said Arthur Albrizio, the interim principal at Holmdel High. “He is so exceptional, so self-driven. He learns for the love of learning.”

This is apparent in the AP courses Allen has taken. Biology, chemistry, physics mechanics. Physics electricity and magneticism. Calculus. Statistics. Computer science. Environmental science. Pretty much what you’d expect from a budding math and science genius

But then there is Latin literature (with a concentration on the poet Catullus). United States history. Two sections of economics. This semester, his last, he is taking AP English, Government and Psychology, and will test in all three, giving him a chance to go 16 for 16.

If you ask his teachers, Allen’s intellectual curiousity is boundless.

“He loves to learn and takes the time to do it,” said Blaha, who was part of the research team at Bell Labs that developed the laser diodes used in fiber optic communications.

Blaha, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Allen may be heading, understands the mental pressure of competitive research science and the pursuit of academic excellence, and she speaks to Allen about it all the time.

“I don’t worry about him that way,” she said. “He has many interests. He is very balanced. I’ve worked around very smart science people, but some can be very myopic. Allen is not just a scientist. He is a student of the world.”

“The purpose of high school is to explore everything and that’s what I try to do,” said Allen, who enjoys sketching, painting in acryllics, and ran cross-country.

“He has a lot of interests,” said Holmdel superintendent Barbara Duncan.

And in that respect, the most amazing thing about Allen is how normal he is.