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Wimauma Math Whiz Meets President Obama

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By BILLY HOUSE

bhouse@tampatrib.com

Published: March 10, 2009

WASHINGTON - Being a mathematics whiz kid added up to a special moment Monday for 17-year-old Maxim Rabinovich of Wimauma.
Rabinovich landed an invite to the White House as one of 40 national finalists in the annual Intel Science Talent Search. There, they got to shake hands with President Barack Obama.

"It was pretty exciting to see him in person," Rabinovich said while standing outside the West Wing, moments after he and the 39 other high school seniors met Obama.

He said Obama told them science and math education is vital, and that he intends to provide significant funding and resources to those areas.

The White House visit was part of a whirlwind of activities for the student from Shorecrest Preparatory School in St. Petersburg. There, Rabinovich plays violin in the concert band, is first in his class of 55 students, and received perfect SAT scores.

However, it was his mathematics-science project dealing with the arcane process of determining "the scaling limits of generalized anisotropic models" that led Rabinovich to be selected as a national finalist - Florida's only finalist - in the nation's oldest and most prestigious precollege science competition.
Rabinovich and the others are competing for $530,000 in scholarships; the top winner will receive a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

In reality, each already has won; all finalists will get at least $5,000 in scholarships and a new laptop. The top winners will be announced at a black-tie gala tonight.

Along with meeting with the president, they displayed their research at the National Academy of Sciences.

Ask Rabinovich about his research, and his answer can make your head spin.

The project seeks to address what Rabinovich describes as the random process of diffusion in which a finite set of particles start out on points on a grid, and then those particles that share a site move randomly to unoccupied points.

Got it?

In short, he offers, it has various engineering applications.
Rabinovich is hoping to attend either Harvard or Princeton to study mathematics next year. Born in the Ukraine, he is the son of Paul Rabinovich and Julie Roebuck.

Reporter Billy House can be reached at (202) 662-7673.

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