Brett Berger, a fifth-form student from Asheville, NC, was honored for his second-place finish in the math portion of a competition sponsored by the Virginia Academy of Science and the Junior Academy of Science and held during the 69th annual meeting of these organizations on May 21, 2010, at James Madison University. Students from public and private high schools across Virginia competed in areas ranging from agriculture and animal science through zoology.

Brett was honored for his paper, “Tioptimization: The Tangency Property in Maximum Inscribed Triangles,” and the ten-minute presentation he made before a panel of mathematics educators from across the state. In the paper, he explored the largest triangles that could fit inside an ellipse. He proved an interesting result that he called the “tangency property” and used this property to relate the vertices of these triangles to each other.

The Virginia Junior Academy of Science (VJAS) helps to ensure the vitality and excellence of scientific research and education in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Founded in 1941 and ranked by the American Junior Academy of Science among the top three junior academies in the U.S., VJAS serves more than 40,000 junior and senior high school students in Virginia, awarding more than $75,000 in grants, scholarships, and awards each year.