A 14-year-old won a prestigious award for his discoveries on 'antiprime numbers' [View all]
Akilan Sankaran, 14, is on his school's varsity track team, plays piano, the flute and drums — and yet somehow still found time to devise a computer program that could speed up some of your favorite apps.
That program won the ninth-grader from Albuquerque, N.M., the $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize, the top award in the Broadcom MASTERS, a highly-competitive science and engineering competition for middle school students.
For his winning project, Akilan wrote a computer program that has the potential to make everyday tasks online run smoother and more efficiently. The program he created can calculate antiprime numbers, which are highly-divisible numbers with more than 1,000 digits, and he discovered a new class of functions to analyze these numbers' divisibility.
"We use these numbers all the time in our daily lives without even thinking about it," Akilan said in his project presentation. "Because we have a natural tendency to want to split things into smaller groups. For example, 60 is a highly divisible number, and we use it to divide time, as there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour."
In a similar way, highly divisible numbers are useful in computing because they can be used to divide data among computer processors, Akilan explains.
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/02/1051476829/a-14-year-old-won-a-prestigious-award-for-his-discoveries-on-antiprime-numbers
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