NELL CLARK / NPR
Akilan Sankaran, 14, is on his school’s varsity track team and plays the piano, the flute and drums — and yet somehow he still found time to devise a computer program that could speed up some of your favorite apps.
That program won Akilan, who’s from Albuquerque, N.M., the $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize, the top award in the Broadcom MASTERS, a highly competitive science and engineering competition for middle school students.
For his winning project, Akilan wrote a computer program that has the potential to make everyday tasks online run more smoothly and efficiently. The program he created can calculate antiprime numbers, which are highly divisible numbers with more than 1,000 digits, and he discovered a new class of functions to analyze these numbers’ divisibility.
