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At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery
After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.
As a teenager, Cairo constructed a function that behaved in strange and unexpected ways, disproving a major conjecture in a field called Fourier restriction theory. The professor for the course was Ruixiang Zhang, an accomplished mathematician whose path into the field had followed a more traditional arc: a gold medal at the 2008 International Mathematical Olympiad, the prestigious high school competition; a doctorate from Princeton University; a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study; a tenure-track position at Berkeley, one of the top math departments in the world. “Some mornings, I’d wake up with the idea that because it’s so simply and elegantly stated, and it’s so broad, in the end it had to be true,” said Tony Carbery, a mathematician at the University of Edinburgh who worked on the problem for decades.
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