60th Annual STS (2000–2001)
Finalists
Jason Wah Lone Chiu

WYOMING
Jason Wah Lone Chiu, 15, of Laramie, submitted a graph theory project as his mathematics entry for the Intel Science Talent Search. Jason investigated hamiltonian cycles on checkerboards of various sizes where rules are given for when it is allowed to pass from one square to another on the board. A hamiltonian cycle is a path through the squares which goes according to the rules of passage and enters each square exactly once before it returns to its starting point. Jason showed that any hamiltonian cycle will exhibit certain uniform behavior. Further, he found several cases where he was able to put together hamiltonian cycles from ones on smaller boards. Jason attends Laramie High School, is a former baseball player, enjoys speech and debate and volunteers at the Laramie Plains Museum as a docent. His hobbies include aviation, cycling, fishing and competing in mathematics contests. As a result of his work for one such contest, Jason reports that he was able to identify new patterns among powers of Fibonacci numbers-a sequence of numbers studied by mathematicians for several hundred years. The son of Gary and Rosenda Chiu, Jason hopes to study math and computer science at MIT.