60th Annual STS (2000–2001)
Finalists
Gabriel Drew Carroll

CALIFORNIA
Gabriel Drew Carroll, 18, of Oakland, submitted a mathematics project that studies partially ordered sets, called posets, to the Intel Science Talent Search. Gabriel used a standard geometrical object, called the simplicial complex, to study posets. A poset is a set for which some of its elements are larger than others, but not any two elements need be comparable. The width of a poset is a measure of how far the poset is from having any pair of elements that are comparable to each other. Gabriel shows a connection between the topological complexity of the geometric object, as encoded by a set of functions, and the width of the corresponding poset. Gabriel is first in his class of 283 at Oakland Technical High School where he is president of the math club. He enjoys piano, debate, poetry, and computer programming and has won numerous math awards including a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1998 and a silver medal at the same competition in 1999. The son of Dr. Allen and Diana Carroll, he earned a perfect 1600 on his SATs and plans to further his mathematics studies in college.