Corina TarnitaPORTER GIFFORD
Corina Tarnita shrugged off her undergraduate mentor’s advice to take a year off before starting grad school in 2006. She instead raced through her program in just three years, even after making a midcourse switch from high-dimensional geometry to mathematical biology—a transition she describes as going from math that’s impossible to visualize to math that gives an account of the real world.
“With pure math, something was either wrong or right and you could prove it,” the now-28-year-old postdoc from Romania says. “With biology it’s not like that. It’s always a work in progress.”
METHODS: A three-time Romanian National Mathematical Olympiad champion, Tarnita was a shoo-in for Harvard’s math program. “She was one of only two math students in five years who was asked to ...
