At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine
After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.
Hasnain says:
“He and others in the harmonic analysis community will also have to reckon with a changed landscape. In harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates. If a conjecture known as Stein’s conjecture were true, it would cement connections between some of the most important questions in that broader constellation. But Cairo’s work shows that Stein’s conjecture is false. It eliminates one of the most promising links mathematicians had hoped to establish between different parts of harmonic analysis.
The math world is also adjusting to the fact of Cairo herself. After completing the proof, she decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping college (and a high school diploma) altogether. As she saw it, she was already living the life of a graduate student. Cairo applied to 10 graduate programs. Six rejected her because she didn’t have a college degree. Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions.
Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree.”