Tricky math SQL statement

Hi there, I have a tricky SQL statement which I would like to put on a MySQL 3.X DB Not sure if this workes out with a simple statement, thats why I post it into the php.db newsgroup. Might require some php?! -------- OK... short description: tablelayout: timestamp user_id points The goal is to get out of this table the top 3 users which have acchieved the most points in the last 7 days. -------- This requires some calculation within the db, as far as I know this should be possible, but this seems a bit to complex. I tryed some statements, but failed ;-(( Something like: SELECT DISTINCT user_id FROM table WHERE MAX (SUM(points)) ORDER BY timestamp LIMIT 3 Thank you for any help on this. I am not a SQL expert, so I am having a real hard time on that one. Cheers, Merlin