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

[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

[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

[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: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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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...

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.