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."

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

A more reliable source perhaps?

[sirdude]

The link in the article seems to be from some sort of spammy ad/link farm. This [mercurynews.com] 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:Breaking Stereotypes

[hoytak]

http://xkcd.com/447/ [xkcd.com]

Re:That must have been _hard_!

[Anonymous Coward]

MichaelKristopeit = very small penis.

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.