Indian American Teen from Bloomfield Hills excels in Intel Talent Search Competition

Sohan Venkat Mikkilineni, 17, of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan is one of the four Indian Americans among the 40 finalists selected January 31st in the ongoing Intel Science Talent Search competition -- the country's elite science competition for high school students.

Sohan's Bio as mentioned in the Intel Talent Search Website

Sohan Venkat Mikkilineni, 17, of Bloomfield Hills, submitted an Intel Science Talent Search mathematics project that analyzed determinantal sequences. A d-determinantal sequence is a doubly infinite sequence of integers (..., an-1, an, an+1,...) such that the two-by-two determinant anan+3 - an+1an+2 = d. Note that three consecutive entries, together with d, determine the sequence. For ¦d¦>1 and where there is no common divisor of all the terms with odd indices (and similarly for even indices), Sohan proved that there are, with few exceptions, only finitely many solutions. By setting x = a1, y = a2 one sees a link between determinantal sequences and those solutions of the equation ax2 + abxy - by2 = -d with none of the pairs (x,b), (y,a) and (x,y) having a non-trivial common divisor.

Sohan attends Detroit Country Day School in Beverly Hills, and is captain of the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Club. His scientific achievements have earned him a certificate of tribute from Governor Granholm. An accomplished cellist, Sohan is a member of the Detroit Civic Sinfonia Orchestra. The son of Drs. Prasad and Jhansi Mikkilineni, he plans to study pre-medicine at MIT or Stanford.