America’s most promising young scientists, including a Unionville High School senior, were celebrated last week in the nation’s capital as they received a total of more than $1 million in awards through the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search.
Shashwat Kishore, 18, of Birmingham Township, one of 40 students nationwide and the only Pennsylvania resident in the finals, won the $35,000 Third Place Medal of Distinction for Basic Research. However, it’s not likely that the average person would consider his high-level work anywhere near basic.
His math project, entitled “Multiplicity Space Signatures and Applications in Tensor Products of sl2 Representations,” involved an object of recent interest called a quantized quiver, in which a “quiver” is an orientation on a graph, an Intel press release said. Kishore identified, for the first time, a family of unitary matrix representations for a quantized quiver. He also developed a new relationship between representation theory and topology, the release said.
Administered by the Society for Science & the Public, the Intel Science Talent Search encourages students to tackle challenging scientific questions in an effort to improve people’s lives. During an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. from March 5-11, the finalists experienced a rigorous judging process, interacted with leading scientists, displayed their research to the public at the National Geographic Society, and met with national leaders, including President Obama.
Kishore said he was thrilled to be in such great company for the week. “I had an absolutely amazing time and made so many new friends,” he said. “It was a huge honor to visit the White House and meet Obama, and to interact with all the scientists and researchers.”
Having excelled in math for years, Kishore credits his successes to his family. He said his 25-year-old brother, Shaunak, an MIT graduate who now works for Google, piqued his interest in math in first grade. He said he attended the “buzzer round” of one of his brother’s 8th-grade math competitions and got hooked. He has also benefitted from supportive parents: his father, Sheel, studied engineering in college while his mother, Smita, pursued chemistry.
Kishore, a repeat winner in annual Delaware Valley Science Fair competitions, has also gained acclaim in the USA Junior Mathematics Olympiad’s summer program. In 2012, Kishore was one of 14 winners nationwide in the 10th-grade and under. He won again in 2013 and was invited to participate in the Olympiad's summer program.
In June, Kishore was one of 83 students selected from around the globe to attend the 31st annual Research Science Institute (RSI), an intensive, six-week program at MIT that provides students with the opportunity to conduct original, cutting edge research in state-of-the-art facilities.
When he’s not solving math problems – “on a good day” that amounts to a few hours – Kishore has kept busy as a varsity letterman on Unionville’s cross-country team; captain of the Academic Team, which just qualified for the finals of the county competition; and as a clarinetist in the school’s symphonic band.
Kishore, who has not yet decided which college he will attend, knows that he will study both math and computer science, which he believes “hold the keys to solving major problems in biology, economics and technology.”
He explained that much biological and economic data has been collected. “The main challenge currently is to make sense of that data in a useful way,” he said. “I think that in general, quantitative approaches are very promising for analyzing this data and drawing conclusions from it.”
For more information on the Society for Science & the Public and the Intel competition, visit https://www.societyforscience.org.
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