Teen takes his 'Pi' with a little music on the side

By: EZEKIEL GUZA - Staff Writer | Sunday, August 6, 2006 8:16 PM PDT ∞

CARMEL VALLEY ---- Michael Viscardi has always enjoyed pushing the limits of his mind.

The 17-year-old, who will attend Harvard in the fall, wasn't satisfied with taking calculus at UC San Diego as an eighth-grader.

Peter Ebenfelt, his mentor and professor in the class, remembers Michael showing up at his office hours every week, but not because he was struggling.

"We very rarely talked about the material in the class because that was pretty easy for him," Ebenfelt said. "That was obvious because he aced all the tests."

Instead, Michael would bring in unsolved problems from scholarly, professional mathematical journals to work out with Ebenfelt.

"He has a love for mathematics that's very refreshing for a math professor to see," Ebenfelt said. "I rarely see it in my students. He gets so excited about mathematics, especially when you tell him something he didn't know. I'm not sure mature is the word, because his work ethic isn't something you see in most working adults."

Michael's work and solution on one problem, the Dirichlet, took more than six months.

"The thing that a lot people don't understand is that math theorems don't just come to you," Michael said. "You have to work a lot at it. I don't just think about it when I'm sitting at my desk. I'll be in the shower or walking around and just think."

The work paid its dividends when it earned him a $100,000 college scholarship from Siemens.

He has since begun work on the Pompeiu problem, first theorized in 1929.

Despite his unrelenting will to find orderly solutions to complex math problems, Michael said there is no meaning behind his favorite number, 31.

"It just kept popping up everywhere and I started to like it," he said with a laugh. "No real reason."

Despite a perfect score on his SATs, more than $200,000 in scholarship money, and national media coverage, Michael said he doesn't feel like a genius.

"I never really thought about it like that," he said, in response to a question about whether he felt pressure. "I feel normal."

The math whiz's favorite movie is not "Pi" or "Good Will Hunting" that chronicle math prodigies, but the comedy, "The Princess Bride."

"It's just a fun movie to watch," he said with an ear-to-ear grin.

To wind down from hours of dense, abstract thinking, Michael reads classic novels, talks with friends, or engrosses himself in his other passion, music.

Yet even while relaxing, Michael strives for a challenge. He plays the violin and piano and was the concert master for the San Diego Youth Symphony during the last year. He said he has taken on what he said are some of the most challenging pieces of one of his favorite composers, Gyorgy Ligeti, on the piano.

"He wrote these really difficult piano etudes, probably some of the most difficult ever written, and I played one of them," Michael said.

While he is torn between music and math, luckily, he won't have to chose what to study in college.

"I'll be a math major at Harvard and studying violin at New England Conservatory of Music nearby," he said. "They have a special dual enrollment program."

For the last two weeks Michael has worked with a group of international students who came from all over the world to participate in a music camp with the youth symphony. The group's daily rehearsals culminated in two concerts last weekend at which they performed Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.

He also has a new musical project.

"I'm starting to learn the organ right now," Michael said. "It's a little different from piano because you don't just have one, but three, keyboards."

Despite his love of math and music, Michael said he isn't so interested in melding the two disciplines.

"I like to actually keep math and music a bit separate," he said. "Sometimes, people ask me if I like it because of the ratios or note length, but I like music because it is expressive and emotional. It's a nice balance with math."

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