Awards and Certifications From November 19-21

Teen Math Whiz Wins Siemens Competition: Allen Yuan, a senior at Detroit Country Day School, won the top individual competition and a $3,000 prize in the Region Three Finals of the 2010-11 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, held over the wekeend at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. He now moves on to the national finals in Washington, D.C., where the winners of six regional competitions will vie for the $100,000 Grand Prize and national acclaim for extraordinary scientific achievement at the high school level. Yuan's project, "Linearly Many Faults in (n,k)-star Graphs," falls into the area of Graph Theory, which is useful in the design of computer networks.  Addressing the issue of keeping a network robust, he proved that a network of a well known design had the property that if a few sites are knocked out, the network is only minimally impaired. "With care and skill, Mr. Yuan showed that a set of graphs which have received some attention lately -- the so-called (n,k)star graphs -- will be minimally impaired even if a rather large number of sites is removed," said competition judge Francis X. Connolly, a mathematics professor at Notre Dame. "He used difficult induction techniques and a striking recursive property which the (n,k) star graph enjoys. Mr. Yuan's work was marked by a spirit of carefulness and exhibited a sharp, deep understanding of the material." Yuan has been interested in mathematics for as long as he can remember. In addition to being a skilled mathematician, he is a talented pianist and won first prize in the Eastman International Piano Competition. In his free time, he plays recitals at local senior centers. Yuan plans to study mathematics and piano performance in college. He was mentored by Eddie Chan of Oakland University, who had done earlier work on (n,k) star graphs. Team regional finalists winning a $1,000 scholarship from Michigan were Randy Jia and David Lu pf Detroit Country Day; Sresht Rengesh, Avondale Senior High School, Auburn Hills, and Ananya Mukundan, International Academy East, Troy; and Xiao Zhu and Lawrence Kim of Troy High School. The Siemens Competition was launched in 1998 to recognize America's best and brightest math and science students. More at www.siemens-foundation.org.

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