Meet Rachel Chen, 18, who won $100K for her breakthrough quantum math research using simple diagrams

Rachel Chen, 18, won $100,000 for her innovative quantum mathematics research. (Photo: Society for Science) At just 18, Rachel Chen has taken a decades-old mathematical idea and expanded it into a visual framework for understanding complex quantum systems, earning her a $100,000 award in the 2026 Regeneron Science Talent Search.Chen, a student at Marlborough School in Los Angeles, California, won fourth place in the prestigious competition for her mathematics project, titled The Dual Canonical Basis in the Spin Representation via the Temperley-Lieb Algebra.Her research builds on a 1997 mathematical finding involving Temperley-Lieb diagrams - simple point-and-curve illustrations that can be used to represent aspects of quantum systems.Chen's work extends that approach to describe how an entire system of quantum particles behaves under the influence of a magnetic field, potentially giving researchers a more intuitive way to examine relationships between different quantum-mechanical states.How Rachel Chen turned complex quantum physics into diagramsQuantum mechanics is notoriously difficult to represent mathematically because particles can interact with one another and their surroundi...