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

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."

Comments

Breaking Stereotypes

[MyLongNickName]

This 17 year-old is breaking age stereotypes. I applaud that someone this old is still contributing to the field of mathematics. Kudos you old man!

(insert obligatory XKCD here)

Re:Breaking Stereotypes

[hoytak]

http://xkcd.com/447/

Re:Breaking Stereotypes

[bigredradio]

He is also from Boston and likes to drink beer and get into fights with his friends. The boy is "wicked smart".

Re:Breaking Stereotypes

[mdielmann]

It could be argued that not being surrounded by under-supervised near-sociopaths until such an age as to not be a near-sociopath yourself isn't a bad thing. A number of famous people in many walks of life were home-schooled, including the likes of Thomas Edison. Here's a link of famous homeschooled people you might recognize. Granted, it's from a site promoting home schooling, but it still gives you plenty of names to google for further verification.

Re:Breaking Stereotypes

[fahlesr1]

One of my roommates in college was home schooled. He was also one of the smartest people I met in college, though I can't say if that was from natural ability or his insane study habits. He was also very self-disciplined and I still am envious of his self control. He was a little socially awkward, but not much more than any other geek (he was after all a physics major, I was computer science)

Granted he is only one example, but when you look at the state of public education, its no wonder so many people choose to home school. Homeschooling isn't entirely anti-social either. He was in a homeschooling group with several other home schoolers, their parents would would take turns teaching the subjects they were strongest in. I've also heard of homeschooling being able to join the extracurricular activities at their local public high schools, such as sports or band.

I don't know much about that world, but I think there's a lot more opportunity there than most people would expect. In any case its something I'll seriously consider when/if I have children. I am somewhat disillusioned with public education. My high school had such a bad drug problem they removed all the doors from the rest room stalls so it was easier to catch students smoking weed.

Re:Breaking Stereotypes

[recrudescence]

Actually, Thomas Edison is probably the worst example you could pick. Reportedly the man was a sociopath. For all his genius and cunning, he still:

• electrocuted animals with AC current and invented and popularized the electric chair just to make a marketing point of AC being unsafe, so he would promote a DC current as the standard (arguably a less safe form of electricity) for common use.
• He manipulated or outright cheated the patent system out of other people's inventions; the most famous one being the lightbulb.
• Relied on (what I would call 'Apple-like') marketing rather than facts to manipulate public opinion, intimidate, and promote a lot of his ideas, sidelining significantly better opponents and inventions / discoveries.
• His antics among others, severely limited the work of a *true* genius of the time, Nikolai Tesla, purely for monetary and personal gratification, setting science back by years http://goo.gl/vguj5

Shrewd business man? Yes. Ambitious? Skilled inventor and scientist? Yes. Hardworking? Yes ... but also a sociopath nonetheless.

Re:Breaking Stereotypes

[demonlapin]

Most of the top academic performers will eventually go on to be the best engineer in their company. Meanwhile, the future CEO is hanging out with his classmates.

Re:Breaking Stereotypes

[mug funky]

please, no URL shorteners. this isn't twitter, and i don't know if you're hiding a goatse behind that.

Also won national spelling bee

[Yold]

He won the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee also.

Re:Also won national spelling bee

[nthitz]

I recognized his name immediately. After all he taught me how to spell it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRZNQ06kWyc [Kiran Chetry CNN Spelling Champ interview - hilarious]

Re:That must have been _hard_!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:That must have been _hard_!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Oh look, it's one of the i-did-not-come-up-with-it-myself-at-that-age-and-so-it-is-no-good crowd!

Sorry. I'm just really noticing lately the how stereotypical the kneejerk negative replies that we see here.

Here are the basic templates they seem to follow thus far:

• I didn't think of this idea, so it sucks [also known as "I won't admit that I'm envious at not having thought of this idea, and so I will point out how it sucks"]
• I did think of this idea 10 years ago!
• I don't see the point, therefore it will flop.
• I thought of a really obvious flaw that invalidates this entire concept - surely the engineers/inventors/etc didn't think of THAT one first!

Re:charity?

[Fibe-Piper]

I resent the idea that Mr. Sheen now owns the word troll. Slashdot has owned that term forever.

Haters gonna hate

[Palmsie]

There is a whole lot of hate in the above comments. Especially within a website that values science, math, and technology, why should he be shunned? We need more people who are willing to make the necessary sacrifices (e.g. social, monetary, etc) to devote all of their energy toward progressing humanity forward.

Good for him. Keep it up. Go invent something even better. And next time, bring some people along with you so even more people can see the value in science and the scientific process. It's a shame that society doesn't value these walks of life when they govern everything we do in the modern world.

Re:Haters gonna hate

[Beelzebud]

Apparently it does, because you're reading /. and here it is....

Re:Haters gonna hate

[gstoddart]

The hate is directed at the entry at a fundamental level. He deserves a pat on the back, but "teenager wins competition for teenagers" doesn't exactly merit a ./ nod.

Why not? He accomplished something in the field of mathematics.

If that isn't "news for nerds", then I don't know what is -- it's far more interesting than hearing that Taco visited Lucasfilm but can't tell us anything about it other than a showing picture of him in front of a Yoda statue.

Re:Haters gonna hate

[praxis]

While I agree that the quality of the stories posted to Slashdot is subjective, so is the definition of news for nerds. Why should nerds not be interested in politics, entertainment, economics, or what have you as it relates to them, their hobbies, their jobs, etc? If Slashdot only covered new concepts in mathematics and science, it wouldn't be any more interesting than reading over the abstracts of your favorite journals. Slashdot give us a bit more breadth than our journals do.

Re:Haters gonna hate

[Hazel Bergeron]

in what way does the quote show him to be mathematically naive?

Let's break it down:

"Math is neat: A statement is either true or false,” O’Dorney says.

Depending on the axiom system preceding it. Or is undecidable. Or may simply be badly formed.

“In science, any theory can be overturned by experiment because science is founded on experiment.

Is it? Historically, it certainly hasn't been: the foundations of science are in mathematics and philosophical induction aka expecting the expected. Kids today are seduced by Popper's ramblings on falsifiability (and much else) and forget the previous 3 millennia of science.

But in math, there are theorems that can never be overturned because they have been proved with logic.”

Within a particular axiom system. Which science also uses to derive its theorems - it's just that science deprecates those systems which do not model reality sufficiently well.

I don't think I'll ever enjoy this man's raw mathematical power, but I do recall being a precocious little shit. The kind of bold, absolute statements he is making about mathematics vs science were those I'd make as an 11 year old and grew out of by my early teens.

Hey, I know that guy!

[Anonymous Coward]

My son competed in the national "Who Wants to be a Mathematician" competition for high school students in New Orleans last January. (He was one of ten contestants, so we were proud.) Evan O'Dorney was the defending champion, and he won the event pretty handily. (My son came within one question (!) of competing against him in the final round, btw.)

I spoke briefly with Evan at the competition. Definitely a strange personality -- Asperger's or high-functioning autistic or something. He seemed pretty nice, though, and his explanations of how he got his answers were very clear and concise. Glad to see he's making a name for himself.

I believe he also won the national spelling bee when he was, like, ten or something.

Re:Hey, I know that guy!

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

for some reason that story reminded me of this quote from Good Will Hunting.

Sean: Hey, Gerry, In the 1960s there was a young man that graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley. He was assistant professor. Showed amazing potential. Then he moved to Montana, and blew the competition away.
Lambeau: Yeah, so who was he?
Sean: Ted Kaczynski.

I hope he does well.

Re:Hey, I know that guy!

[winomonkey]

I hope he does well.

And I hope that he does good, too.

A more reliable source perhaps?

[sirdude]

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.

What new marvel will he perform next?

[snowmenr4ever]

Learn how to drive. On a more serious note, the actual formula is 4d{+2}/k-d{+2}. He's done a bunch of theoretical math. Kudos to him http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-03-05/news/28661918_1_graphing-calculator-international-math-olympiad-stanford-university-math

Re:Home-schooled nonetheless

[NoSleepDemon]

Considering how many people live in America, it's almost a statistical certainty that one of them may be smart.

So where is the Paper?

[xophos]

When i try to read more than the abstract, they want some kind of login.
Please next time spare us the teasing and ignore news without content.

Be very careful dude!

[93 Escort Wagon]

You're living at home, minding your own business and playing lots of computer games - then you go and solve some really hard math puzzle. Next thing you know, you're billions of light years from earth on a broken down starship, with no way to get home and lots of people trying to kill you! It's not worth it...

Re:That must have been _hard_!

[Anonymous Coward]

MichaelKristopeit = very small penis.

Re:charity?

[Cstryon]

Way off topic, and I could be feeding trolls, but I just can't help it.

Michael Kristopeit, number 401 or 269 or enter some set of numbers, is always doing this negative comment, slashdot = stagnant crap. But yet, this guy has a great number of usernames. Seriously?!? Just go somewhere else. In case you didn't notice, nobody likes you.

"slashdot = stagnated" = Michael Kristopeit has nothing better to do.

Now for on topic. I love to hear about genius kids. One day this kid could be doing a lot of good for man-kind. I wonder how many other kids his age, or even younger, are currently using their brain. Whether for good now, or just for fun that could end up being good later. Just awesome.

Calculus

[Nukedoom]

He's home schooled and studied Calculus at UC Berkeley when he was around 13.

Re:charity?

[spun]

Oh, no Charlie! We're not afraid of you, Charlie! We just want you to come to Candy Mountain with us, it'll be an adventure! Yeah, Charlie, Candy Mountain. It's a land of sweets and joy...and joyness.

Re:To the winner, I have 1 thing to say!

[brendank310]

Slashdot doesn't have a built-in LISP interpreter.

Explaing what he did in more detail.

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:charity?

[spun]

Look Charlie! It's a magical liopleurodon, it's going to be our guide to Candy Mountain!