61st Annual STS (2001–2002)
Finalists
Jacob Licht

CONNECTICUT
Jacob Licht, 17, of West Hartford, studied Rainbow Ramsey Theory, which says that patterns must exist within disorder, for his Intel Science Talent Search project in mathematics. Traditional Ramsey theory shows that any large set with few colors has a "nice" monochromatic subset. Jacob considers the question of finding a set that involves not one but all colors. He shows that whenever each integer number is colored red, blue or green, and each of the three colors is used more than a sixth of the time, there must exist numbers a, b, c having different colors with a + b = 2c. He is co-author of a paper submitted to the Journal of Combinatorial Theory on the Rainbow Ramsey Theory, which he calls a new branch of combinatorics that parallels Ramsey theory. At William H. Hall High School, Jacob is captain of the math team and a volunteer math tutor. He has earned numerous academic honors in math, chemistry and Latin and has won two talent shows with his Elvis impersonations. In his spare time, he enjoys basketball, weight lifting and magic tournaments. The son of Martha Licht, Jacob, who was born in Israel, plans to study mathematics and physics at MIT or Caltech.