A 14-year-old Indian-origin boy bagged the top award among five winners of a premier science and engineering competition for middle school students in the US.
Akilan Sankaran from Albuquerque, New Mexico, has won the Samueli Foundation Prize. It is the top award in the Broadcom MASTERS, America's premier science and engineering competition for middle school students. Sankaran, the first student with a Mathematics project in the competition's 11-year history, won USD 25,00
The 14-year-old wrote a computer program that can calculate highly divisible numbers, sometimes called anti-prime numbers, that are over 1,000 digits long, creating a new class of functions and the smooth class to measure a number's divisibility. By analysing and developing smooth highly divisible numbers, his goal was to make calculations run more quickly. This would come in handy for everyday processes and tasks.
The Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars), is a programme for the society of science which inspires the students of middle schools to follow their passion in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
Thirty finalists, including Sankaran, took home more than USD 100,000 as award money.
Camellia Sharma, 14, Henrico, Virginia, won USD 10,000 by building a 3D-printed aerial drone come boat that can fly to a spot, land on the water and take underwater photos.Her software can then count the fish living there.
Prisha Shroff, 14, Chandler, Arizona, won the USD 10,000 Lemelson Award for Invention, as she developed an AI-based wildfire prevention system that uses satellite and meteorological data to identify fire-prone locations and deploy drones there.
Ryka C. Chopra, 13, Fremont, California, won the USD 10,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award as she geocoded the locations of fast-food restaurants to see if they are built near populations of obese people, perhaps contributing to the obesity cycle.
The winners were chosen from 30 finalists selected from among 1,841 applicants from 48 states, Washington DC and three US territories like Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands. The winners were selected by a panel of scientists, engineers and educators.
Each finalist's school will receive USD 1,000 from the Broadcom MASTERS programme.