Hobbies
Reading, French, Frisbee

Clubs
Math Circle

Experience
American Mathematics Contest (AMC), American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), 2004 Clay Math Research Academy, Intel ISEF, United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO), 2003 U.S. Physics Team

Biography
I am a senior at the Hathaway Brown School "Where Girls Soar"— which, yes, is all-girls. Before learning to soar, I was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and moved to Cleveland, OH, when I was 12 and in 7th grade. Since my grandmother has taught mathematics all of her life and my mother majored in it, I was doomed to start learning (and liking) it at a rather early age, so I wasn't too enthusiastic about the proposition that I spend my 7th grade in the United States solving things like "x+3=7." My lack of enthusiasm prompted the teacher to hand me a textbook and let me be. Currently, I am taking a linear algebra course at the Case Western Reserve University, and took a multivariable calculus course there last semester. Other recent math activities involve two summers spent at the Ross Summer Mathematics Program (amounting to 16 weeks of variations on number theory and abstract algebra), as well as four summers before that at a math camp in Russia. I have also recently survived a week at the 2004 Clay Math Research Academy, where we were taught many beautiful things about representation theory much too quickly.
I have also completed a research project that usually believes itself to be a mathematical analysis of the optimal length of a musical scale, although it appears that I have by now spent more time talking about it than working on it. I have also, of course, participated in things like the AMC and the AIME; unfortunately, for the past four years I have proven sufficiently incapable of accurate calculation as to not make it to the USAMO. This has not prevented me from starting and guiding a mildly successful Math Circle (the name is a literal translation of the Russian term for such an object) at school, which has attempted to actually do math problems during meetings instead of simply saying "math is cool." I have also answered some ridiculously large number of questions as a volunteer on www.mathnerds.com (a number qualifies as "ridiculously large" when it reaches 1000).
My interest in physics didn't really have a clear starting point, particularly since I moved out of Russia just as we were starting to learn physics there. I took the AP Physics course in 11th grade, and upon finding out there does in fact exist a physics competition analogous to the AMC (i.e. the test that brought me here) I read through the textbook rather quickly and took the test. It appears that my cursory knowledge of theFundamentals of Physics (Halliday, Resnick, Walker) was enough to carry me to the 2003 US Physics Team, causing me to have a quite interesting schedule in May of that year, as I had a week with six AP exams, followed immediately by Intel ISEF, followed immediately by the Physics Team Training Camp. As the 2003 training camp left me with many wonderful physics books, I was able to study rather more thoroughly this year, with the result that I now have had more than a two-hour crash course on special relativity and other topics in modem physics. It also was a joy to reread the chapters on electricity and magnetism with the knowledge of what the words "surface integral" really mean. My less technical interests, last time I met with them, included reading Bradbury, Tolkien, and Orwell, as well as studying French, with vague plans for learning German in college; I have also been known to enjoy playing frisbee in various adverse conditions (in particular, high concentrations of mud). For future education, I am trying to decide between Harvard and MIT, with the plan to major in mathematics.