Akilan Sankaran, a 14-year-old Indian American student from Albuquerque, New Mexico, has won the top $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize in America’s premier science and engineering competition for middle school students. Akilan is the first student with a math project in the competition’s 11-year history to take home the Samueli Foundation Prize in the Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars), a program of the Society for Science.

The prize is a gift of Dr. Henry Samueli, Chairman of the Board, Broadcom Inc., and Chair of the Broadcom Foundation and his wife, Dr. Susan Samueli, President of the Samueli Foundation.

Akilan wrote a computer program that can calculate “highly divisible numbers,” sometimes called antiprime numbers, that are over 1,000 digits long, according to a press release from the Broadcom Foundation and SfS.

“He created a new class of functions — the smooth class — to measure a number’s divisibility. Akilan’s program has the potential capacity to speed up and optimize the performance of software and apps, such as Shazam.”

By analyzing and developing smooth highly divisible numbers, Akilan’s goal was to make calculations run more quickly, in turn accelerating countless everyday processes and tasks, the release said.

Sankaran “hopes to become an astrophysicist so that he can merge three of his favorite topics: physics, mathematics and space science”, according to the SfS.

The other top winners took on issues ranging from wildfires to obesity to water and light pollution.

Camellia Sharma, 14, Henrico, Virginia, won the $10,000 DoD STEM Talent Award. She built a 3D-printed aerial drone/boat that can fly to a spot, land on the water and take underwater photos. Her software can then count the fish living there.

Prisha Shroff, 14, Chandler, Arizona, won the $10,000 Lemelson Award for Invention, awarded by The Lemelson Foundation to a young inventor who creates a promising solution to a real-world problem.

Prisha developed an AI-based wildfire prevention system that uses satellite and meteorological data to identify fire-prone locations and deploy drones there.

Josephine E. Schultz, 14, San Antonio, Texas, won the $10,000 Marconi/Samueli Award for Innovation. She studied painted lady butterflies and found that changes in light patterns can affect their emergence from their chrysalises by up to two days.

Ryka C. Chopra, 13, Fremont, California, won the $10,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Award for Health Advancement.

Chopra geocoded the locations of fast-food restaurants to see if they are built near populations of obese people, perhaps contributing to the obesity cycle.

“Congratulations to all our Broadcom MASTERS winners,” said Maya Ajmera, President and CEO of the Society for Science and Publisher of Science News.

“The young people we are celebrating today are working to solve the world’s most intractable problems. The Broadcom MASTERS finalists serve as an inspiration to us all, and I know they will all go on to find immense success on their STEM journey.”

“The entire Broadcom family congratulates Akilan and the Broadcom MASTERS Class of 2021.” said Paula Golden, President of Broadcom Foundation.

Thirty finalists, including Akilan, took home more than $100,000 in awards. Each of the 30 finalists participated in online team challenges in addition to being judged on their science research projects. The challenges leveraged project-based learning and tested their mastery of 21st Century skills of critical thinking, communication, creativity and collaboration in each of the STEM areas. The finalists analyzed biodiversity in their local communities, designed clinical trials, constructed gliders and developed functional programs using Raspberry Pis.

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