Evan O'Dorney


Evan Michael O'Dorney is an American mathematics student at Princeton University. As a home-schooled high school student and college student, he won many contests in mathematics and other subjects, including the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, 2011 Intel Science Talent Search, four International Math Olympiad medals, and three Putnam Fellowships. A 2013 report by the National Research Council called him "as famous for academic excellence as any student can be".

Education and competitions

As a home-schooled high school student, O'Dorney attended classes at the University of California, Berkeley from 2007 to 2011. He was the winner of the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee,
and an interview O'Dorney did on CNN with Kiran Chetry after he won the Scripps Spelling Bee later became a viral video. During this time he was a four-time International Math Olympiad medalist, with two gold and two silver medals. In 2010, he won $10,000 in a national "Who Wants to Be a Mathematician" contest, held at that year's Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. In 2011 he won the Intel Science Talent Search for a project entitled "continued fraction convergents and linear fractional transformations".
He started attending Harvard College in 2011 where he studied mathematics. He placed out of Math 55A, 55B and jumped straight into graduate classes in mathematics. While at Harvard, he was a three-time Putnam fellow. In 2015–16, he studied Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, on a Churchill Scholarship. In 2016 he received honorable mention for the prestigious Morgan Prize in mathematics. As of Fall 2016, he is a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton University. His advisor is Manjul Bhargava.

Other interests

Although his primary interest is mathematics, O'Dorney has had a strong interest in music. In 2007, he composed a song to help memorize the digits of. At Harvard, O'Dorney studied music as well as mathematics, and continued to compose music, as well as singing in a chamber music group and playing the organ and piano. Evan also has absolute pitch.