Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition
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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 1064 entries for the 2005 exhibition, although only 480 got through a screening process. The competition was founded in 1965 and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2005. 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.
[edit] Recent winners of the competition
- 2006: Aisling Judge became the youngest ever winner of the competition. The fourteen-year-old from Kinsale Community School was awarded the overall title for her project The development and evaluation of a biological food spoilage indicator. In her project she produced a unique food indicator to let any member of the public say how fresh a food is regardless of the storage conditions. Aisling competed in the 18th EU Contest for Young Scientists which was held in Stockholm in late September 2006. Although being the youngest competitor amongst the 121 students from 78 teams representing 33 countries at the contest, she won third place. She was 15 at the time of the contest and all of the other winners were 18 or older, most of whom had commenced university education
- 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. He went on to take second place at the 17th European Contest for Young Scientists in Moscow.
- 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 developed a new networking socket and web browser that enables faster Internet access even with an ordinary modem. His Browser which he hoped to be commercially sold, was demonstrated to companies such as IONA Technologies in Ireland, and is due to be approved patent status in late 2006.
- 2002: David Michael O'Doherty, a student of Gonzaga College, was the winner for his project The Distribution of the Primes and the Underlying Order to Chaos. He is now 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 won the title of Millennium Young Scientist of the Year for his project on “The Geography and Mathematics of Europe’s Urban Centres”. This was the first time in the competition's 36-year history that a Social & Behavioural Sciences project won the top award. In recognition of his achievement, Thomas was honoured with a joint civic reception from Louth County Council and Dundalk Urban District Council. He was later awarded the prestigious Alumni Prize at the 12th European Union Contest for Young Scientists, held in Amsterdam. In 2004, Thomas graduated with First Class Honours in Geology from University College Dublin. He is currently conducting a De Beers funded Ph. D. on the volcanic eruption mechanisms of diamond bearing rocks at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol. This project involves both experimental work on particles and fieldwork at Jwaneng Diamond Mine in the Kalahari Desert, Republic of Botswana and the De Beers Venetia Mine on the South-Africa Zimbabwe border. His work on the internal structure of volcanoes also takes him to many active volcanoes around the world, including those of Iceland, Italy, Greece and Far Eastern Siberia.
- 1999: Sarah Flannery was the winner for her project Cryptography - A new algorithm versus the RSA. She researched a new cryptographic algorithm, the Cayley-Purser 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 0-7611-2384-9). 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. She worked for Wolfram Research for aperiod and in 2006 is working with the EA Software Company in California..
- 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. He gained a BSc (Hons) Joint Honours in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from University College Cork in 2005. In February 2006 he was named UCC Graduate of the Year.
