Teen Wins $100,000 Science Scholarship
Dec 9, 2:00 PM (ET) - WASHINGTON (AP) - A high school senior who developed a theorem that could potentially apply to code-cracking and artificial intelligence won a $100,000 scholarship on Monday.
Steven Byrnes, 18, of Lexington, Mass., emerged from five finalists to take home the prize in the fourth annual Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology, which hands out more than half a million dollars in scholarships to high schoolers.
For his math project, titled "Poset-Game Periodicity," Byrnes created and proved a theorem that for years had stumped many mathematicians.
Organizers said it represented a breakthrough in a famous poset game called Chomp that was invented in the 1970s. Two-player poset, or partially ordered set, games are important to the growing field of discrete mathematics for their potential use in artificial intelligence and secure codes on computer networks.
The theorem is "sort of a foundation for a new field of math and where that field will lead, of course, nobody knows," Byrnes, who wants to study math at Harvard University next year, said after an awards ceremony at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A dozen other students competed for scholarships as pairs, with Juliet Girard, 18, and Roshan Prabhu, 16, both seniors in Jersey City, N.J., sharing a $100,000 prize for identifying genes that contribute to early flowering time in rice. The finding could potentially increase crop production and benefit regions with shorter growing seasons.
"In terms of practical application, you can't beat this one," said Joel Spencer, a math and computer science professor at the Courant Institute at New York University and one of 11 judges.
The 17 students feted in Washington this weekend were chosen from over 1,100 entries.
Craig Venter, a leader in sequencing the humane genome, lent some parting words of advice: "You're standing at the threshold of very promising futures. ... Cast aside your fears and doubts and challenge yourself everyday to take risks, to resist the temptation to conform to those around you."
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