A lidar image of a portion of the San Andreas Fault from the B4 project. Credit: Michael Bevis, Ohio State University
16-Year-Old Wiz Kid Solves Dirichlet Problem
Michael Viscardi, of the Josan Academy for the Gifted in San Diego, won the Siemens Westinghouse Competition for his solution to the Dirichlet Problem. The problem involves solving a partial differential equation within a region, given boundary conditions. Viscardi said his work can be used for engineering applications, such as heat flow.
"This solution was not known before," said Peter Ebenfelt, Viscardi's adviser and a math professor at the University of California San Diego. "The Dirichlet problem is a very old problem; it's been around since it was formulated by Dirichlet in the 19th century."
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"Michael Viscardi is only 16 years old, yet he has produced work that is at or near the Ph.D. level," said Siemens Westinghouse judge Steven Krantz via e-mail. "[His results] are in a subject area that I have been studying for more than 30 years, and yet he saw further than I have seen."
Viscardi says he hopes to continue studying mathematics in college.
"I want to study math; I want to be a pure mathematician," he said. "Also, I want to be as much of a musician as I can."
Viscardi has applied to Harvard, hoping to take Math 55, the notoriously difficult introductory course, and to enter a joint program with the New England Conservatory where he will study either piano or violin. He will find out whether he has been accepted next week.
An Elephant Never Forgets Last Night
The word on the street—and in the South African bush—is that elephants like to get drunk off of fermented marula fruit. Not so, say a group of University of Chicago researchers in a forthcoming paper in Physiological and Biochemical Zoology. While elephants have historically displayed a taste for booze, and while the marula fruit can ferment when it falls off the tree, the researchers say the elephants clearly prefer the fruit on the tree. But don't place any elephants on your DARE posters, yet. The elephants eat the bark of the marula tree as well as the fruit; a substance in the bark has been used to poison arrow tips. When the elephants act drunk, they're probably on something harder than alcohol.
It's Our Fault
In the most meticulous study ever conducted of the San Andreas fault, researchers have collected data that will serve as a before picture—hence the name "B4" Project—to compare to data they will collect after the next major earthquake. By contrasting these two sets, they may be able to determine what happens at a fault during an earthquake, and how the earthquake starts. The researchers combined two technologies—high-resolution GPS, and a radar-like system called lidar that measures the time it takes for light to reflect from a surface—to create a model detailed enough to include cows and small trees. (source: Ohio State University)
I'm Gonna Live Forever
A study in the forthcoming issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology discusses "late life," a phase of life where age-related deterioration ceases. A sudden plateau in mortality rates after a certain age has been observed in several species, including people, but its human incarnation has always been tossed off as a result of our remarkable care for the elderly. Now it appears that this plateau is real and the process of aging eventually grinds to a halt. (source: University of Chicago)