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Hannah Cairo: 17-year-old teen refutes a math conjecture proposed 40 years ago

Hannah Cairo has solved the so-called Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a problem in harmonic analysis closely linked to other central results in the field. This fall, she will begin her doctoral studies at the University of Maryland

Finally, after several failed attempts, I found a way to construct a counterexample [a case that does not satisfy the studied property and therefore proves it is not universally true].” Ciaro says it required several tools, including fractals, and she had to arrange everything very carefully. The conjecture was widely believed to be true — if so, it would have automatically validated several other important results in the field — but the community greeted the new development with both enthusiasm and surprise: the author was a 17-year-old who hadn’t yet finished high school. Then I realized that, in fact, there was another, much simpler way to design a counterexample,” she states with satisfaction in one of the rooms of the San José Residence in El Escorial, where the 12th International Congress on Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations was held from June 9 to 13.

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