

16-year-old who solved Dirichlet Problem still active in mathematics at age 23 - tokenadult
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Viscardi

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tokenadult
Michael Viscardi's paper on the Dirichlet Problem (with his mentor as co-
author) can be found here:

<http://www.heldermann-verlag.de/cmf/cmf05/cmf05027.pdf>

Here is some press coverage of Michael Viscardi:

[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10336018/ns/technology_and_scien...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10336018/ns/technology_and_science-
science/t/homeschooled-teen-wins-top-science-honor/)

<http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/PersonOfWeek/story?id=1391089>

[http://presskit.ditd.org/2006_Davidson_Fellows_Press_Kit/200...](http://presskit.ditd.org/2006_Davidson_Fellows_Press_Kit/2006_DF_Michael_Viscardi.pdf)

<http://www.ams.org/notices/200603/people.pdf>

(second and third pages of link above)

I had the privilege of meeting Michael Viscardi at a Davidson Institute for
Talent Development event in 2007. He has an engaging curiosity. He said that
he worked with his mentor by reading undergraduate books about mathematics and
working through the problems until he got stuck. Then he would ask his mentor
what else he should read to understand the part of the first book that puzzled
him. He relentlessly moved forward in his understanding of mathematics, both
through this process and through the American Mathematics Competitions

<http://amc.maa.org/>

programs, until he found the Dirichlet Problem and began working on that.
Asked at the 2007 event what the applications of solving that problem are, he
said that he (then) had no idea what the applications of the solution would
be, but that he had heard from other researchers that there are important
physics applications for the solution. When Viscardi entered Harvard
University, before the usual age of college entrance, he didn't even take
Harvard's legendary Math 55 course

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55>

but went immediately into taking graduate-level courses in Harvard's
mathematics department. It will be interesting to see his further development
as a mathematician.

