Seventeen year old Hannah Cairo solved a 40-year-old mystery that predicted how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.
Kevin Hartnett writing for Quanta Magazine:
“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar Oliveira of the University of Birmingham, who has spent the past two years trying to prove that the conjecture was true. In her paper, Cairo showed that it’s false. The result defies mathematicians’ usual intuitions about what functions can and cannot do.
So does Cairo herself, who found her way to a proof after years of homeschooling in isolation and an unorthodox path through the math world.
I’m only a little familiar with Fourier methods when it comes to compression of data. This article was fascinating throughout and especially fun that she is so young.
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