Tong Zhan
OHIO
Tong Zhan, 16, of Mason, investigated Rainbow Ramsey Theory, which asks
about combinatorial properties of the natural numbers for his Intel Science
Talent Search project in mathematics. A rainbow coloring of a set of numbers is
one in which each of the numbers is assigned a different color. Tong showed that
a coloring of the natural numbers in which each of three colors is assigned
sufficiently often must contain a rainbow coloring a, b, c such that a - b = c2.
He conjectured that there is also a rainbow triple a, b, c such that a2 + b2 =
c2. Earlier Rainbow Ramsey results involved solutions of linear equations; Tong
improved certain ones of these en route to his results on quadratic conditions.
A student at William Mason High School, Tong is first in his class of 662. A
violinist in the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra, he has earned perfect SAT
scores. The son of Yunsong Zhan and Jihong Chen, Tong was born in China, and
spent the summer of 2008 researching in the Clarks Scholar Program at Texas Tech
University. Tong hopes to attend Yale or Princeton, and aims to discover
connections between math and science that will contribute to problems such as
protein folding and cryptography.
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