Brief by Shorts91 NewsDesk / 09:02am on 12 Aug 2025,Tuesday Education
Hannah Cairo, a 17-year-old homeschooled prodigy from the Bahamas, has stunned the global mathematics community by refuting the 40-year-old Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture. The conjecture, rooted in harmonic analysis, had resisted proof for decades. Cairo constructed a counterexample that disproved it entirely, earning praise from top mathematicians. Self-taught through online resources and math circles, she mastered advanced topics by age 14 and joined graduate-level courses at UC Berkeley. Her breakthrough came during a Fourier restriction theory class. Despite lacking a high school diploma or undergraduate degree, Cairo has been accepted directly into a PhD program at the University of Maryland. Experts hail her achievement as one of the most remarkable mathematical feats by a teenager. (PC: Quanta Magazine & India Today)
