Archive: Naperville's Ravi Jagadeesan Wins $50,000 Davidson Fellowship

From the TI archives — originally published September 2014.

Eighteen-year-old Ravi Jagadeesan of Naperville, Illinois, was named a 2014 Davidson Fellow Laureate — one of four students nationwide to receive the $50,000 top-tier scholarship that year from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.

His winning project, "A New Galois Invariant of Dessins d'Enfants," was original research in mathematics: it studied the symmetries and solutions of polynomial equations with rational coefficients, advancing understanding of how different mathematical structures relate. He completed the project while at Phillips Exeter Academy, and told Northwestern's Center for Talent Development — where he'd been a summer-program student as a child — that the work had been "always in the back of my head."

The Davidson Fellows program, founded by Bob and Jan Davidson, awards $50,000, $25,000, and $10,000 scholarships to students 18 or younger whose projects have the potential to benefit society. Since its 2001 inception it has been named one of the most prestigious undergraduate scholarships in the country by U.S. News & World Report. The 2014 laureates — twenty fellows in all — were honored at a Washington, D.C., reception on September 26, 2014.

Jagadeesan went on to Harvard as a freshman that fall, aiming at research in mathematics, economics, or science. A Naperville kid doing graduate-level math in high school — and getting paid for it in scholarship dollars.