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17-Year-Old Wins Intel's $100K Science Prize

Posted by samzenpus on from the boy-genius dept.

autospa writes "A California teenager who cracked a complex mathematical equation has been awarded the Intel Science Talent Search's $100,000 first-place prize. Evan O'Dorney, 17, won the prize for 'his mathematical project in which he compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer. [He] discovered precisely when the faster way would work,' Intel announced Wednesday."

6 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Also won national spelling bee by Yold · · Score: 4, Informative

    He won the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee also.

  2. Re:That must have been _hard_! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're an idiot if you think that's what he actually won for. Here's an abstract of his work: http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/4/3/5/0/2/p435027_index.html

  3. A more reliable source perhaps? by sirdude · · Score: 3, Informative
    The link in the article seems to be from some sort of spammy ad/link farm. This might be a little authentic.

    At 17, Danville's Evan O'Dorney already has won the National Spelling Bee and a gold medal at an international math Olympiad, meeting two presidents along the way. On Tuesday, he claimed the triple-crown: the coveted Intel Science Talent Search's $100,000 top prize.

  4. Re:Breaking Stereotypes by hoytak · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://xkcd.com/447/

    --
    Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
  5. Re:That must have been _hard_! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    MichaelKristopeit = very small penis.

  6. Explaing what he did in more detail. by JoshuaZ · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ok. Going off of the description http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/4/3/5/0/2/p435027_index.html TFA and the summary are somewhat inaccurate. He wasn't calculating the speed of different methods. Rather, he took two well known methods of approximating a square root, both of which when starting with a rational number give you a sequence of rational numbers which converge to the square root, and he gave a close to complete description of when the two sequences share infinitely many terms. This doesn't have any obvious algorithm application but it is very nice number theory.