NYTimes: Intel Competition - Where Science Rules

asteriskea
Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:06:25 +0000

Follow-up article from the NY Times, the winner is 17-year-old Mary Masterman:



A senior at Westmoore High School in Oklahoma City, Mary built the spectrograph at home for $300, and her project won the top prize of a $100,000 scholarship in the Intel Science Talent Search Monday night in Washington.

?The most challenging part was trying to get it to work,? said Mary, who said she hoped to attend Stanford or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

?I had to keep coming up with creative ways to adjust or change something,? she said. ?It took three months to build and another three months before it actually functioned properly.? …

Some 1,700 students entered this year?s contest, and 40 finalists were chosen, all of whom won a laptop computer and a cash prize. The finalists were almost equally divided by sex. Six women were among the top 10.

The second-place winner was John Pardon, 17, of Chapel Hill, N.C., who researched the unfolding of simple closed curves. He won a $75,000 scholarship.

Dmitry Vaintrob, 18, from South Eugene High School in Eugene, Ore., won the third-place prize, a $50,000 scholarship, for a mathematics project exploring loop homology. …

New York produced 12 finalists, more than any other state.

Two New Yorkers placed in the top 10.