Left to right: Aayush Karan, Daniel Zhu, Merrick Cai, Sanjit Bhat
A record number of Davidson Institute Fellowships received — 4! — were collected by our PRIMES high school students this summer. They swept all three prizes in math, and won the only award in Massachusetts.
Two received 2019 Davidson Fellowships:
Aayush Karan, 17, of Muskego, WI, received the $25,000 Davidson Fellowship for his project “Generating Set for Nonzero Determinant Links under Skein Relation,” done under the mentorship of CLE Moore instructor Dr. Jianfeng Lin, and published in Topology and Its Applications 265 (2019). He said in his award statement, “Under Dr. Lin’s mentorship, I not only completed my project in knot theory but was able to learn a great deal about the research process.” Aayush has entered MIT as a freshman this fall.
Daniel Zhu, 17, of Potomac, MD, received the $10,000 scholarship for his project "On the Okounkov-Olshanski formula for the number of tableaux of skew shapes,"" under mentor UMass-Amherst Prof. Alejandro Morales, MIT Math PhD '12. In his statement, he said that Prof. Morales was "a constant source of ideas, suggestions, or just simply motivation."
Two others received honorable mentions: Merrick Cai, who also is attending MIT this fall, and was mentored by Daniil Kalinov; and Sanjit Bhat of Acton, MA, under mentor Dimitris Tsipras of EECS.
"I wish to congratulate PRIMES Chief Advisor Pavel Etingof, Head Mentor Tanya Khovanova, and the mentors, and to thank them for their dedication and hard work!" said PRIMES Director Slava Gerovitch.