Naperville student wins $50,0000 scholarship

An 18-year-old Naperville student has won a $50,000 scholarship for her studies in algebra and will be honored next week in Washington, D.C.

Meena Jagadeesan was one of 20 students from across the country to be named a 2016 Davidson Fellow by the Davidson Institute of Talent Development. Her project was "The Exchange Graphs of Weakly Separated Collections."

"My brother, Ravi, was a Davidson Fellow Laureate in 2014, and I'm excited to be a Davidson Fellow Laureate as well," Jagadeesan said.

In her project, Jagadeesan explored the crossover of algebra and combinatorics, the branch of mathematics dealing with combinations of objects belonging to a finite set in accordance with certain constraints.

Her work in understanding higher-dimensional vector space and understanding the structure of the nonnegative Grassmannian has applications in compute-based image recognition.

Jagadeesan comes from a long line of mathematicians and high-level thinkers. Both her parents are computer scientists, and all four of her grandparents are retired math professors.

When not studying math, Jagadeesan enjoys playing piano, running, being in nature, and watching spy movies.

The 2016 Davidson Fellows will be honored Sept. 21 at a reception in Washington, D.C.

The Davidson Fellows Scholarship program offers $50,000, $25,000 and $10,000 college scholarships to students ages 18 or younger who have completed significant projects that have the potential to benefit society in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, literature and music.

It is a program of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a national nonprofit organization headquartered in Reno, Nevada.