All too often, all we hear about teenagers is bad news. Here are some good ones that won the Siemens Westinghouse Competition. There are a lot more out there like them, but if they don't get into trouble or can't play ball, we may never hear of them.

A high school senior who developed a theorem that could potentially apply to code-cracking and artificial intelligence won a $100,000 scholarship on Monday.



Steven Byrnes, 18, of Lexington, Mass., emerged from five finalists to take home the prize in the fourth annual Siemens Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science and Technology, which hands out more than half a million dollars in scholarships to high schoolers.

For his math project, titled "Poset-Game Periodicity," Byrnes created and proved a theorem that for years had stumped many mathematicians.

Organizers said it represented a breakthrough in a famous poset game called Chomp that was invented in the 1970s. Two-player poset, or partially ordered set, games are important to the growing field of discrete mathematics for their potential use in artificial intelligence and secure codes on computer networks.

The theorem is "sort of a foundation for a new field of math and where that field will lead, of course, nobody knows," Byrnes, who wants to study math at Harvard University next year, said after an awards ceremony at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.