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Karl Menger Memorial Awards

Photo from the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive.
The Karl Menger Award is given to pre-college students in mathematics as well as mathematically-oriented projects in computer science, physics, and engineering at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) .

About this Award

The family of the late Karl Menger was the major contributor to funds established at Duke University and the AMS. An anonymous donor generously augmented the fund in 2008. The majority of the income from these funds is used by the Society for annual awards at the International Science and Engineering Fair.

The awards are: \$2000 for first prize; \$1000 for each second prize; \$500 for each third prize.

Most Recent Award: 2023

The AMS presented the Karl Menger Awards at the 2023 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (Regeneron ISEF) on May 17th. The winners are high school students who earned the right to compete at the Regeneron ISEF by winning a top prize at a local, regional, state, or national science fair. The first place award of $2,000 was awarded to Nicholas Hagedorn of Princeton High School in Princeton, New Jersey for Strict Inequalities for the n-Crossing Number.

The Menger Award Committee also presented the following awards:

Second award of $1,000: Nikola Gyulev, Model High School of Mathematics "Akademik Kiril Popov", Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Proof of the Complete Presence of a Modulo 4 Bias for the Semiprimes, and Jeffrey Xu, Montgomery High School, Skillman, New Jersey, Extending the Vieta-Newton Theorem

Third award of $500: Stefan Gaydarov, Model High School of Mathematics "Akademik Kiril Popov," The Shape of Polynomial Map x ?Üí kx^n Mod P, Joseph Vulakh, Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, Lexington, Kentucky, Hereditary Atomicity and ACCP in Monoids and Integral Domains, Meryl Zhang, R. C. Clark High School, Plano, Texas, The Easiest Hard Problem: A Heuristic Solution to the Two-Way Partitioning Problem Using Probabilistic Algorithms, and Sophie Zhu, Williamsville East High School, Williamsville, New York, Pointed Fusion Categories Over Non-Algebraically Closed Fields, and

Certificates of Honorable Mention: Joseph Crachiola, Saginaw Arts and Sciences Academy, Saginaw, Michigan, Creating and Assessing a Tool to Organize Graphs Using Hooke's Law, Camille Duma, Vanguard High School, Ocala, Florida, Application of Michaelis-Menten Rational Function Models, Parametric Calculations, and Differential Equations to Determine the Most Influential Factor on Histamine Levels, Yunjia Quan, Charlotte Country Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina, Improving Bitcoin's Post-Quantum Transaction Efficiency With a Novel Lattice-Based Aggregate Signature Scheme Based on CRYSTALS-Dilithium and a STARK Protocol, and Rich Wang, William P. Clements High School, Sugar Land, Texas, Ending States of a Special Variant of the Chip-Firing Algorithm, and Andrew Zhang, Wayzata High School, Plymouth, Minnesota, Extremal Problems on the Steiner k-Distance and the Steiner k-Wiener Index

Award announcement as seen in the news release.

See previous winners

Next Award:  May 2024