10 Winning Science Fair Projects That Will Make You Feel Dumb (via Neatorama)In the category of mathematics, 17-year old Sana Raoof of Jericho High School in Jericho, New York produced this mind-bender to win the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and $50,000 scholarship in the 2008 fair in Atlanta. She chose Harvard, which no doubt feels privileged to have won the bidding for this brilliant young mathematician.
Just in case you are having trouble recalling exactly what chord diagrams and singular knots are all about - having perhaps missed that particular sub-chapter in your high school math class - Greg Muller offers a passable introduction at his blog The Everything Seminar to refresh your memory. Basically, knot theory is about solving simple problems with advanced techniques. For those of us who don't like doing things the easy way...
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"Basically, knot theory is about solving simple problems with advanced techniques. For those of us who don't like doing things the easy way... "
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually tried to do anything with knots.
I made a volcano...
Wow. That gave me hope for our future.
I barely touched upon topology in the four years it took me to get my BS in math. Not only is she rather gifted mathematically, that was a damn good two and a half minute presentation, and I could actually follow the big-picture thinking behind it even if details escaped my grasp.
Now to move on from being distracted by embedded video and actually click on the link...
Dear Math Girl:
Please time travel into the past and go to my high school. You're ten times more awesome than anyone else I met there.
I get the idea of classifying the number of loops in DNA and I get the idea of wanting to classify proteins based on their structure, however neither of those two polymers ever ties itself into a knot. Though I'm sure knot theory is helpful for classifying loops and basically any structure it is a bit misguiding when knots never actually form in those systems (in knot theory, I think, all biological molecules form what would be called an unknot).
Still, she's way smarter than me and I'm nearly done with a PhD in biophysics!
Oh yeah? Well, I built a mouse maze and got three mice to learn it. Then I timed them three times each. Then I got one drunk, one buzzed, and left the third sober. Then I timed them again.
The buzzed one was actually the fastest. The drunk one failed miserably of course.
This was in eighth grade. A few years later I was caught drinking at a hotel the night before an academic science competition. I used my results to (not entirely successfully) argue my case to the vice-principal. Memories...
Oh yeah? Well, I built a mouse maze and got three mice to learn it. Then I timed them three times each. Then I got one drunk, one buzzed, and left the third sober. Then I timed them again.
The buzzed one was actually the fastest. The drunk one failed miserably of course.
This was in eighth grade. A few years later I was caught drinking at a hotel the night before an academic science competition. I used my results to (not entirely successfully) argue my case to the vice-principal. Memories...
Oh yeah? Well, I built a mouse maze and got three mice to learn it. Then I timed them three times each. Then I got one drunk, one buzzed, and left the third sober. Then I timed them again.
The buzzed one was actually the fastest. The drunk one failed miserably of course.
This was in eighth grade. A few years later I was caught drinking at a hotel the night before an academic science competition. I used my results to (not entirely successfully) argue my case to the vice-principal. Memories...
I couldn't understand a single word she said, cuz I suck at Maths big time, but one thing I could tell is that this certainly rocks.
And that yes, I do feel incredibly dumb right now, but that's a feeling I'm quite familiar with.
I couldn't understand a single word she said, cuz I suck at Maths big time, but one thing I could tell is that this certainly rocks.
And that yes, I do feel incredibly dumb right now, but that's a feeling I'm quite familiar with.
Forgive me, but I got to brag on my son a bit! He's 17, a junior, and going to ISEF (Intel International Science and Engineering Fair) in Reno, NV next month. He's got a program he created originally attempting to prove P=NP, which is one impossible math problem you can win a million dollars if you solve, (http://www.claymath.org/Popular_Lectures/Minesweeper/) that uses algorithms to play Minesweeper. He's already won awards from Intel, Army, Navy & Yale. I hope he wins a big scholarship at ISEF!
I couldn't understand a single word she said, cuz I suck at Maths big time, but one thing I could tell is that this certainly rocks.
And that yes, I do feel incredibly dumb right now, but that's a feeling I'm quite familiar with.
I couldn't understand a single word she said, cuz I suck at Maths big time, but one thing I could tell is that this certainly rocks.
And that yes, I do feel incredibly dumb right now, but that's a feeling I'm quite familiar with.
I couldn't understand a single word she said, cuz I suck at Maths big time, but one thing I could tell is that this certainly rocks.
And that yes, I do feel incredibly dumb right now, but that's a feeling I'm quite familiar with.
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually tried to do anything with knots.
Spoken like someone who hasn't actually tried to anything with knot theory!
I'm really impressed at how smoothly she presented knot theory and how she had the motivation to really go above and beyond high school maths to things that interested her.
It sort of makes me sad that my greatest accomplishment at the time was getting the invincibility cheat in Goldeneye on the N64.
We need more people like her in our world. What a smart girl!!
jajaja >:(