BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition

The BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition is an annual competition held in Dublin, Ireland early in the new year for encouraging interest in science in secondary schools, currently sponsored by BT Ireland. There were 1060 entries for the 2005 exhibition, although only 480 get through a screening process. The competition was founded in 1965 and celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. Previous to 1997, since its inception, the event was sponsored by Aer Lingus and known as the Aer Lingus Young Scientist Exhibition.

The winners of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition go on to participate in international events such as the European Union Contest for Young Scientists and the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar.

Recent winners of the competition

• 2005: Patrick Collison was the winner of the competition for his project "Croma: a new dialect of Lisp". His project produced a new programming language designed for making web pages. The name Croma is an anagram of macro, which is a central part of the language.

• 2004: Ronan Larkin was the winner of the competition for his project Generalised Continued Fractions. His project concerned new techniques for solving difficult mathematical equations.

• 2003: Adnan Osmani was the winner for his project The graphical technological and user-friendly advancement of the Internet browser: XWebs. He claimed to have developed a new networking socket and web browser that enables faster Internet access even with an ordinary modem. However, his browser, which he claimed would be commercially sold, has never been demonstrated. Aptly named Icarus, no patents were awarded to him.

• 2002: David Michael O'Doherty was the winner for his project The Distribution of the Primes and the Underlying Order to Chaos. He is a mathematics undergraduate in the University of Cambridge. His prize was for research into the second Hardy-Littlewood conjecture, an unsolved problem in number theory which concerns the number of primes in intervals.

• 2001: Peter Taylor, Shane Browne and Michael O'Toole were winners for their project Investigating symmetrical shapes formed by polygons. They solved a problem in geometry concerning how regular polygons can be arranged into circular patterns of optimum symmetry.

• 2000: Thomas Gernon was the winner for his project The geography and mathematics of Europe's urban centres. His prize was for mathematical analysis of the trends in urbanisation in Europe.

• 1999: Sarah Flannery was the winner for her project Cryptography - A new algorithm versus the RSA. She researched a new cryptographic algorithm involving matrix algebra which was faster than the RSA (which depends on the difficulty in factoring large integers). Flannery leapt to fame as the speed improvements attracted the attention of the press. Subsequent study showed that the algorithm, while faster, was not secure enough to replace the RSA. She wrote a book on her algorithm and number theory in general called "In Code: A Mathematical Journey" (ISBN 0761123849). Sarah Flannery's project also received a first prize at the 11th European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Thessaloniki, Greece. Flannery gained a BA in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in 2003. At present she is working for Wolfram Research.

• 1998: Raphael Hurley was the winner of the competition for his project The Mathematics of Monopoly. In his project he determined a system for optimally selecting properties in the board game Monopoly, based on the probability of a player landing on those properties.

External links

• Official site (http://www.esatys.com)
• News article about 2003 winner (http://newsobserver.com/24hour/technology/story/712974p-5244591c.html)
• Project report for 2002 winner (http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~dmo25/Primes)
• Summary of 2001 project (http://www.irishscientist.com/2001/contents.asp?contentxml=01p255a.xml&contentxsl=IS01pages.xsl)
• Summary of 2000 project (http://www.irishscientist.com/2000/contents.asp?contentxml=236as.xml&contentxsl=insight3.xsl)
• News article about 1999 project (http://www.wolfram.com/news/flannery.html)
• News article about 1999 project (http://plus.maths.org/issue7/news/sarah/)
• Summary of 1999 project (http://www.irishscientist.com/youthscience/p199a.htm)
• Slashdot Article on Adnan Osmani's Project (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/13/1212253&tid=95&tid=8)