Palo Alto High School senior Lynnelle Ye has been invited to compete in the National Final for the 2009 Seimens Competition in Math, Science & Technology in New York City after winning the top individual prize at the competition’s Region One Finals last Saturday, Nov. 21.
For winning first place in the individual category, Ye received a $3000 scholarship to her future college and an invitation to compete at the televised National Finals in New York City from Dec. 3-7, where she and the five other individual category winners will compete for prizes ranging from $10,000 to the top prize of $100,000.
Ye, president of the Math Club and also a participant in Paly’s Science Olympiad team, beat out hundreds of other students in her region to win the top award. There are six regions that divide contestants in the United States, and they are based on the geographical locations of the hosting universities, whose scientists judge the projects at the regional level. Judges at the California Institute of Technology awarded Ye first place, whose initial goal was just to complete a project that satisfied herself.
“I’m completely shocked,” Ye said. “My initial goal was really just to do a job that I would be personally satisfied with. I daydreamed about winning, obviously, but it wasn’t something that I considered would actually happen.”
She continued, “We didn’t even bring a camera to the awards ceremony because we were certain that someone else would win.”
Ye began working on the project during a summer camp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I heard about the Siemens competition from people I met through math contests, but I didn’t think about entering until I went to the Research Science Institute (RSI) at MIT this summer,” Ye said.
Starting from last May, Ye devoted much of her time towards the completion of this project. Her working hours peaked during the summer, when she received support from her mentor Mr. Tirasan Khandhawit, a graduate student from MIT, whom she met at RSI.
“It’s been a major time commitment,” Ye said. “I was working on it all day every day for six weeks this summer.”
Ye’s inspiration for her project’s subject matter came from a growing interest in the field of game theory as a middle school student.
“I took a class on game theory back in eighth grade and have liked game theory since then,” Ye said. “I suggested my favorite open problem in game theory to the mentor that RSI assigned to me, and from there we worked our way to the current project.”
Game theory is a field of applied mathematics that deals with analyzing and predicting behavior given a set of information. Many fields of study, which include but are not limited to economic theory, biology and philosophy, all utilize game theory in some way.
The project, titled Chomp on Graphs and Subsets, consisted of an analysis of games in which two players take turns eliminating nodes, or edges, of a graph. The player who removes the last edge wins. Ye conducted research to determine the best possible strategy to win and to determine where the best starting location to employ her strategy would be.
“It’s a math research project that combines game theory and graph theory, both fields with wide-ranging applications in areas such as coding theory, artificial intelligence, and economics,” Ye said. “We essentially studied a game called graph chomp and proved winning strategies for certain players under certain situations.”
“Even seemingly simple games like graph chomp can be strikingly difficult to analyze mathematically,” Dr. Michelle Effros, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, said in Siemen’s news release. “Studying this type of question helps us to build tools for reasoning about strategic behavior in more complicated environments.”
Ye looks forward to attending the New York finals and appreciates her current achievement.
“The next step is the Siemens national finals in New York,” Ye said. “It’s an unbelievably amazing opportunity and I’m extremely thankful to everyone at Siemens, at RSI, and in my family who made it possible.”
Established as the premier high school science competition in the nation, the Seimens Science Competition was “launched in 1998 to recognize America’s best and brightest math and science students,” according to its parent organization, The Siemens Foundation. The actual competition is administered by the College Board. Every year, the Siemens Foundation gives out over $7 million in support of education in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math in the United States, with the Siemens Competition rewarding exceptional research projects in those fields.