Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/197412
Emory Hufbauer Hellery Zhang Most Likely To . . . travel in time. Most Likely To . . . make people say touché! Emory is a National Merit Scholarship semifnalist and a self-taught computer programmer in JavaScript. He has excelled in Calculus 3 and has developed games and apps, such as one called CircumGravitate that is available in the Google store. For his school's younger science class, he invented a hydraulic peashooter as an experiment in potential energy. Including her current course load, Hellery has taken 15 advanced-placement (AP) classes. She's already passed 10 AP tests, meaning she'll enter college with 10 courses already out of the way. She's also competed in the Junior Olympics for fencing (which she practices in Lexington four days a week) and is active in her school's Future Business Leaders of America club, among other things. How did you learn about computer science? "I saw some code when I was in seventh grade and thought, hey, I can do that; it's not complete gibberish." "My parents told me to bring my résumé. I wasn't sure what you might need." (Hands over a manila folder with three full pages. The type is in small print.) How does the hydraulic peashooter work? "Basically it was a section of pipe that you atached to a garden hose and the garden hose pushes pressurized water into the pipe, compressing the air. It released a valve at the end, with a nozzle that had the pea in it. The pea shoots out at about 300 to 400 miles per hour." Wow. Now we have so many more questions to ask. What are you most proud of? "Probably fencing because I started when I was 10 and was not athletic at all. I remember some practices and tournaments I would cry on the car ride home because I'd lose all the time and didn't understand why. I kept doing it because I didn't want to quit. Eventually, I started understanding the sport more. They call it physical chess because it's not just about your physical strength and speed. Ultimately you have to have a strategy and exercise good judgment and also remain emotionally calm even in high-pressure situations." 17, Louisville Classical Academy, senior What else have you built? "I build small robots. I built one that was assigned to steal my pet dog's breakfast and take it away so she would have to hunt it down." Have any role models in any of your felds of interest? "Michael Faraday, early-19th-century chemist and nuclear physicist who worked on atoms and such." What kind of books do you like? "I'm a fan of Shakespeare. King Lear's a favorite." What else do you do in your free time? "I like writing programs that combine aspects from diferent felds and show their similarities. I wrote one that uses a mathematical idea." Where do you want to go to college? "A liberal-arts engineering school in California called Harvey Mudd, if I can get in." 17, DuPont Manual High, senior How do you have time for everything? "I'll take a nap on the way (to fencing practice) and then do my homework on the way back. A lot of late nights." You won a scholastic award for writing. What was the essay on? "America's role in humanitarian intervention. My stance was that America should intervene. Now, with all the stuf in Syria, there's a lot of stuf that's relevant." Where do you want to go to college? "Harvard is my dream school in terms of academics and fencing." Fill in the blank: Most likely to . . . "I hope I'm most likely to be working at a job that I love when I'm 80." 11.13 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 51