Second Place: $75,000 scholarship, Yi Sun, 17, of San Jose, California, for a project in mathematics that involves the winding number of a function, which, in the case of the plane, is the number of times it encircles the origin. Third Place: $50,000 scholarship, Yuan Zhang, 17, of Derwood, Maryland for a project in medicine and health. She studied the molecular mechanisms behind atherosclerosis, or arterial plaque buildup, a disease in which lipid-laden macrophages - fat-filled white blood cells - build up in the vessel wall. Fourth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Nicholas Michael Wage, 17, of Appleton, Wisconsin for a project in mathematics in which he studied generalized Paley graphs. Fifth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Jerrold Alexander Lieblich, 17, of East Setauket, New York, for a cognitive psychology study built around an audio-visual illusion called the McGurk effect. Sixth Place: $25,000 scholarship, David Bruce Kelley, 18, of Highland, New York, for a particle physics research project concerning low-energy neutrino detection in liquid neon. David’s project explored the brief delay, called trapping time, that electrons experience when they move through the liquid-vapor boundary in cryogenic liquids. Seventh Place: $20,000 scholarship, Myers Abraham Davis, 17, of Baltimore, Maryland for a computer sciences project that addressed collision detection for physical simulation applications in high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs). Eighth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Adam Ross Solomon, 16, of Bellmore, New York, for a space science project on brown dwarfs - one of the busiest new fields in astronomy. Adam’s project established a new methodology for determining the age and mass of brown dwarfs. Ninth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Evan Scott Gawlik, 17, of Pinehurst, North Carolina, for a project involving the noble gases krypton and argon and the organo-compounds they make with fluorine and chlorine. Evan used a quantum mechanics approach and computational programs to project the existence and stability of six potentially new halogen-containing organo-noble gas compounds. Tenth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Kimberly Megan Scott, 17, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, for a project that combined algebra and logic in which she analyzed Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games, named after the two logicians on whose work these games are based. Fact Monster/Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
