A brilliant teen who honed her skills during the COVID-19 pandemic has solved one of math's most mysterious problems — and in doing so, become a rising star.

As Quanta magazine reports, fledgling mathematician Hannah Cairo was just 17 when she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a decades-old proposition — in higher math, it's common for the suggestion that something is true based on observations to become a target for challenging formalized counter-proofs — dealing with waves on surfaces that nobody had ever successfully countered before her.

The homeschooled math whiz mastered calculus at 11, taught herself from grad school-level textbooks, and worked remotely with professors who her parents hired as tutors, the magazine reports. When COVID lockdowns hit in 2021, Cairo did what

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