Popular Science’s ‘The Brilliant 10 of 2016’ Part 2

This is the 15th year Popular Science has searched nationwide to find the 10 “most innovative young minds in science and engineering.” Below is a brief outline of 2 of this year’s Brilliant 10 of 2016.

John Gunnar Carlsson – 33 year old Carlsson is an Industrial and Systems Engineer at the University of Southern California. However, while still at Stanford University Carlsson was approached by a team of executives from the San Francisco 49ers to solve a problem: they wanted to develop a method to deliver food to game attendants in their seats. This isn’t the first distribution problem Carlsson has solved using math. “From how to route 1,000 delivery trucks most efficiently to getting airplace parts to the correct hangars around the world in the right order,” Carlsson asks “geometrical rather than conceptual questions” to solve distribution problems. Read more about Carlsson here.

Konstantin Batygin – 30 year old Batygin studies planetary astrophysics at Caltech. He and collaborator Mike Brown have developed models that reveal a possible ninth planet in our solar system (and it’s still not Pluto!). While studying the movement of objects in our solar system’s debris belt just beyond Neptune they concluded there is a distant 9th planet that took 20,000 years to make it around the sun. This also explained other oddities in the debris belt, such as why certain objects were clustering. Read more about their model here.