Hannah Cairo captivated the maths world in February when she posted a paper showing that a long-standing conjecture about the behaviour of certain functions was wrong.
At the time, she was just 17 and still being home-schooled, having taught herself much of the math she needed.
Now 18 and about to start a PhD at the University of Maryland, Cairo reveals how she found her way to such an unexpected result and how the experience of being an outsider helped her see things differently.
“I had started making friends, and I was feeling good,” she says of her time in Berkeley.
“I had started to experience something other than just the inescapable sameness of the life I had been living, and I was feeling good.
