Sixteenth Annual Spring-Term PRIMES Conference, May 17, 2026

Sunday, May 17

Mathematics

9:30 am: Welcoming Remarks

• Prof. Pavel Etingof, PRIMES Chief Research Advisor
• Dr. Slava Gerovitch, PRIMES Program Director
• Paige Bright and Mary Stelow, PRIMES Circle coordinators

9:45-10:45 am: Session 1: PRIMES Circle

• Arjun Kaushik and Alyssa Yasuhara, "Surfaces in Knot Theory" (mentor Sabine Chu)
• Yoojung Esther Choe, Maya Figelman, and Alicia Pité, "From Naive Comprehension to ZFC" (mentor Diego Gonzalez Gauss)
• Corrine Chen and Justine Lai, "A Tennis Paradox" (mentor Jenny Jin)
• Bella Chen, Ziyao Ma, and Alice Yin, "Introduction to Sylow's Theorem" (mentor Maximus Lu)

11:00-12:00 pm: Session 2: PRIMES Circle

• Quan Le and Huy Tran, "Beyond Counting: The Deeper Meaning of Combinatorics" (mentor Julia Kozak)
• Mogos Chile and Youssef Mohammed, "Transformations in Geometry" (mentor Ezra Guerrero)
• Nang Dang and Timothy Woods, "The Kelly Criterion in the Modern Day" (mentors Lilian Zhu)
• Jaedon Ruan and Brian Xu, "How to (Potentially) Win a Million Dollars: An Introduction to the Riemann Zeta Function" (mentor Allen Lin)

1:00-1:40 pm: Session 3: PRIMES STEP

• Chris Chen, Vivian Chen, Ray Cui, Ermin Dong, Alexander Radul, Lev Radul, Jack Shan, Arthur Shu, Kenneth Sun, Kenneth Wood, William Zelevinsky, and Brian Zhao (PRIMES STEP Junior group), "Down the Rabbit Hole of Vouchers" (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova)
• Siyona Agarwal, Julian Bernhoft, Yonis Gulleth, Eric Huang, Gill Karam, Benjamin Li, Brandon Ni, Soham Samanta, Leone Seidel, and Boya Yun (PRIMES STEP Senior group), "Self-Referential and Immensely Questionable Tests" (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova)

2:00-3:00 pm: Session 4: PRIMES Circle

• Chloe Carrano and Eileen Lee, "Introduction to Graph Theory: Trees and Colorings" (mentor Nathra Ramrajvel)
• Daniel Gladstone and Isaac Goodman, "A Visual Exploration of Dynamical Systems in the Complex Plane" (mentor Mikaela Finlay)
• Cathen Fontanilla and Zoe Guo, Rohan Garg, and Benny Wang, "An Introduction to Graph Algorithms" (mentor Rosa Paten)
• Emily Chen, Arya Nayak, and Hazel Thrasher, "Automata Theory: How Machines Hear and Recognize Speech" (mentor Alicia Lin)

3:15-4:00 pm: Session 5: PRIMES Circle

• Jonathan Hanna, William Koyfman, and Sam Mayle, "Trees and Paths in Graph Theory" (mentor Dyne Lee)
• Gina Li and Joshua Park, "Coxeter Groups" (mentor Lillian MacArthur)
• Michelle Lau and Kaylee Xie, "Skeletal Structures, Molecules, and Origami Design" (mentors Sam Packman)

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at