66th Annual STS (2006-2007)
Finalists
Dmitry Vaintrob

OREGON
Dmitry Vaintrob, 18, of Eugene, submitted a mathematics project to the Intel Science Talent Search exploring the relationship between two algebraic structures built from the same topological object. One of these, called "loop homology," is built from continuous maps from a circle into any well-behaved space X. (Well-behaved here means that X must be a closed oriented smooth manifold.) Loop homology is difficult to compute, but Mitka showed that in many cases it is isomorphic to the Hochschild cohomology of the fundamental group. At South Eugene High School, Mitka enjoys running, Nordic skiing, learning foreign languages, classical literature and poetry. Born in Russia and fluent in the language, he participates in Russian theater. Mitka has won numerous and multiple math honors; he received the state's top score in the American Math Competition two years running and was twice named one of sixteen Junior Fellows at the Clay Mathematics Research Academy. The son of Drs. Arkady Vaintrob and Julia Nemirovskaya, Mitka hopes to study pure mathematics at Harvard or MIT and one day become a research mathematician and university educator.