Math whiz adds another honor.

Byline: Andrea Damewood The Register-Guard

CORRECTION (ran March 15, 2007): A story on Page A1 on Wednesday misspelled the last name of Julia Nemirovskaya, the mother of Dmitry "Mitka" Vaintrob, who won a $50,000 scholarship from Intel.

Months of obsessing over an abstract, advanced math problem have paid off for a South Eugene High School prodigy - again.

At an awards gala in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday night, Dmitry "Mitka" Vaintrob, 18, added $50,000 to an already impressive cache of scholarship money by claiming third prize in the national 2007 Intel Science Talent Search for his work in the emerging field of string topology.

The Intel prize comes on the heels of a $100,000 first-place award at the 2006-07 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology in December in New York City.

"It was very, very exciting" to win again, Vaintrob said breathlessly over the phone, just five minutes after he learned of his honor. "The best part was meeting and talking to the other kids. And I almost have enough money for college."

His $150,000 in college savings are certainly a relief to his parents, University of Oregon math professor Arkady Vaintrob and UO professor Julia Nemiroviskaya; their son has his eye on two expensive schools.

Vaintrob was accepted to Harvard in November, and will hear (most likely a yes) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April, Nemiroviskaya said. Both schools estimate total expenses at nearly $50,000 a year.

"He got so much money, it's enough to cover at least (three) whole years of college for him," Nemiroviskaya said. "We would be very happy if he could get some more money."

Vaintrob's project - "The string topology BV algebra, Hochschild cohomology and the Goldman bracket on surfaces" - bested more than 1,700 other high school entries.

The projects were whittled down to 40 finalists, who were then judged by a panel of scientists for their overall groundbreaking addition to science.

Vaintrob's work focuses on mathematical shapes, offering insights that are applicable in many fields, and could shed light on fundamental forces such as electricity and gravity.

`There's no question (his work) is at a college level or above - it's graduate-level research,' Intel spokesman Bill MacKenzie said, saying Vaintrob's project stood out among an "amazingly strong" field of competition.

The complex problem was assigned to Vaintrob last summer at an MIT math camp, and Vaintrob said it has consumed his thoughts.

Senior-year demands have required him to scale back his concentration on string topology, but Vaintrob says he still tries to think about math whenever he can.

Vaintrob, who was born in Russia and is fluent in the language, moved to the United States as a toddler and to Eugene six years ago.

While still enrolled at the International High School and French immersion programs at South, he also takes graduate-level math at the UO, meaning the credits from those classes could allow him to graduate from college in as few as two years.

But Vaintrob plans to spend a full four years as an undergraduate, to develop some of his other passions - he plays the piano and enjoys philosophy, art, history and literature.

"He is not just fond of only math, he just loves everything," Nemiroviskaya said, adding that she never let her son skip a grade, for fear of him losing out on life experiences. "He just had to go deep, rather than forward. We kept schooling him in other ways, answering his questions."

It's common to take graduate classes at both Harvard and MIT, so Vaintrob said he thinks he'll be challenged while earning his bachelor's degree.

And someday, he hopes to become a professor and research mathematician.

"Just like my dad, I guess," he said.