After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving
t A paper posted on February 10 left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo, just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.
“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar Oliveira of the University of Birmingham, who has spent the past two years trying to prove that the conjecture was true. In her paper, Cairo showed that it’s false. The result defies mathematicians’ usual intuitions about what functions can and cannot do.
So does Cairo herself, who found her way to a proof after years of homeschooling in isolation and an unorthodox path through the math world.
