Lynnelle Ye, Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, CA

Chomp on Graphs and Subsets

Ms. Ye’s project in the field of game theory studied games in which two players take turns to eliminate nodes, or edges, of a graph. The player to remove the graph's last node wins the game. Game theory is applied in fields ranging from economics to engineering to systems where individuals compete in a shared environment. The aim of the research was to understand the best possible strategy for playing this game and to determine which player will win from each starting graph when each plays her best possible strategy. Ms. Ye worked on this project with her mentor Mr. Tirasan Khandhawit, a Graduate Student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ms. Ye is a senior and the 2008 China Girls Math Olympiad Gold Medal winner, garnering the highest score on the USA team that year. She is also a three-time Math Olympiad Summer Program (MOSP) qualifier and two-time attendee. She has qualified for the USA Math Olympiad three times and been named to her school’s Science Olympiad team since 2007. Additionally, Ms. Ye has qualified for the Research Science Institute. She has been President of her school’s Math Club since 2007 and has served as Coach for the Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School MathCounts since 2006. Ms. Ye’s extracurricular activities include reading, creative writing, art and ballroom dancing. Her dream job is to become a Professor of Mathematics when she completes her studies, as it is one of her top passions. She notes that her interest in the field was piqued when she somewhat accidentally qualified for her middle school's MathCounts team in sixth grade. Ms. Ye is fluent in Mandarin Chinese as well as Shanghainese, a dialect of Chinese.