Virginia School Finds 'Super' Prize's Uses Multiply

By Peter West

Annandale, Va.--Manish Tuteja began charting the realms of abstract higher mathematics with a deceptively simple goal. "I wanted to see if I could make some pretty pictures," he says with a wry grin.

But what the 17-year-old senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology here was actually embarked upon was an intellectual exercise seeking to reduce to an image on a computer screen mathematical concepts that have, he admits, "been avoided by science for a long time."

He was able to abstract his theory in a paper, titled "Complex Plane Analyses of the Newton-Raphson...