Math Helps Three Students Garner Prizes in Intel Talent Search 2008

March 18, 2008

On March 11, Intel Corporation and the Society for Science and the Public awarded ten college scholarships in the Intel Science Talent Search at a banquet in Washington, D.C. This year's finalists "personify what drives American ingenuity," said Elizabeth Marincola, president of Society for Science and the Public.

Three of the ten projects were math based. Katherine Banks, 17 (Brooklyn, N.Y), took fourth-place for a proof about the number of lattice points inside polygons with nine vertices. Sixth-place went to David Rosengarten, 18 (Great Neck, N.Y.), for a model of galactic rotation in the fifth dimension. And Philip Mocz, 18 (Mililani, HI), was the eight-place winner for an algorithm that uncovers distribution patterns of nearby stars.

Banks, who attends Stuyvesant High School in New York, won $25,000 for her project on problems in combinatorial geometry. She proved a conjecture of Stanley Rabinowitz that a convex lattice polygon with nine vertices cannot have eight or nine interior lattice points.

Rosengarten, who attends John L. Miller-Great Neck North High School, won $25,000 by showing that Einstein's General Relativity Theory could modify rotation curves without including dark matter.

Mocz won $20,000 for developing an algorithm that challenges assumptions about random stellar mixing in the galaxy. By analyzing the spatial arrangement of nearby star types, he found that groups of stars tended to contain cool stars and much warmer ones, a finding that challenges the standard assumptions of random stellar mixing in our galaxy. The finding may have applications in pattern analysis in ecology, urban planning, and archeology.

Source: Science News