65th Annual STS (2005-2006)
Finalists
Harley Huiyu Zhang

NEW YORK
Harley Huiyu Zhang, 17, of East Setauket, entered a physics project exploring the role of general relativity in explosions of certain supernovae to the Intel Science Talent Search. These explosions are caused by the rapid gravitational collapse of massive stars, thus creating a shockwave that expels matter from the supernova. For his project, Harley developed a computer program subroutine that evolved the relativistic hydrodynamic conservation laws and Einstein field equations forward in time. By integrating his subroutine into existing supernova modeling code, he compared the Newtonian and general relativistic models, to study the dynamics of the collapse of a star's core. He concluded that general relativistic effects should be incorporated into supernova mechanism models. At Ward Melville High School, Harley is principal violist in the chamber orchestra. Winner of numerous awards in science, math and music, he teaches viola and plays with the All-State String Orchestra. Born in China to Dr. Minghua Zhang and Ying Zhang, Harley is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Harley, who has perfect SATs in critical reading, math and writing, hopes to study applied mathematics at Harvard or MIT.