16-year-old who solved Dirichlet Problem still active in mathematics at age 23

Michael Viscardi's paper on the Dirichlet Problem (with his mentor as co-author) can be found here:

http://www.heldermann-verlag.de/cmf/cmf05/cmf05027.pdf

Here is some press coverage of Michael Viscardi:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10336018/ns/technology_and_scien...

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/PersonOfWeek/story?id=1391089

http://presskit.ditd.org/2006_Davidson_Fellows_Press_Kit/200...

http://www.ams.org/notices/200603/people.pdf

(second and third pages of link above)

I had the privilege of meeting Michael Viscardi at a Davidson Institute for Talent Development event in 2007. He has an engaging curiosity. He said that he worked with his mentor by reading undergraduate books about mathematics and working through the problems until he got stuck. Then he would ask his mentor what else he should read to understand the part of the first book that puzzled him. He relentlessly moved forward in his understanding of mathematics, both through this process and through the American Mathematics Competitions

http://amc.maa.org/

programs, until he found the Dirichlet Problem and began working on that. Asked at the 2007 event what the applications of solving that problem are, he said that he (then) had no idea what the applications of the solution would be, but that he had heard from other researchers that there are important physics applications for the solution. When Viscardi entered Harvard University, before the usual age of college entrance, he didn't even take Harvard's legendary Math 55 course

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55

but went immediately into taking graduate-level courses in Harvard's mathematics department. It will be interesting to see his further development as a mathematician.