Last week, Jonathan Geller ’20 was selected to be a member of the US National Physics Team. Every year, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) sponsors a competition for high school students to represent the United States at the International Physics Olympiad Competition. This year, the competition will be held in Tel Aviv, Israel.
During mid-February, Geller took the “F = ma” test, one of the qualification exam for the Physics National Team. “I totally forgot to sign up for this exam. Luckily, about a week before this examination, I tried to sign up and there happens to be an extra exam paper because one student canceled it,” said Geller when asked about his progress towards the national physics team. Even though he took the test without much preparation, Geller received a terrific score on this test. Thus, he was eligible to take the United States Physics Olympiad exam. In the second exam, Geller was close to being disqualified from the competition, as his submission efforts down to the final seconds.
“It was 7:55 p.m. and the deadline was 8 p.m. We were frantically trying to scan the papers, but the copying machine broke. After fixing the copier, I think we literally sent it in thirty seconds before the deadline.” Geller said.
There were many ups and downs in his journey towards becoming a member of the National Physics team. Out of more than three hundred fifty students, Geller received the gold medal for the Physics Olympiad and is one of the twenty high school students in the country selected as members of the team. From May 28 to June 8, the team will train at the University of Maryland to prepare for the International Physics Olympiad in July 7th to 15th. Geller noted, “I think it is really awesome that I get the opportunity to work with these impressive students in this focused camp so I can learn more about physics.” This training camp is an intense one-week program that involves lectures and experiments that will heighten their knowledge of physics. Five of the twenty students in this camp are chosen to compete in Physics Olympiad. As his next benchmark, Geller hopes he to be a member of the traveling team.
“Physics is at a medium between very cool scientific phenomenon that is difficult to predict and the math where everything works out, but you just end up with a number on the page. I really love how everything just works in physics, like you can predict where the ball is going to land, and it works every time.”
Geller, like most students at Choate, started to learn physics during his freshman year. Due to the support from his physics teachers, Dr. Chris Hogue and Mr. Jon Gadoua, Geller became more interested in this subject. “Both teachers made a huge difference in how I approached all of these [physics] problems. Dr. Hogue in particular always went beyond the basics of the material both in physics and in SRP which prepared me with a lot of the more unusual science knowledge that came in handy on these tests.” Geller has continued to be involved in physics at Choate. Other than taking advanced physics classes, he is currently engaging in quantum computing research at Yale University for his SRP project. “Right now, quantum computing is very ineffective. There was recent news about the quantum computer being able to factor fifteen! However, in the long term, we already know things that a quantum computer can theoretically do such as cryptography and simulating particle physics.”
Geller is also the co-president of Choate’s Physics Club along with Will Zhu ’20; The club mainly solves problems and teaches physics to the Choate and local community. The club had an event last week at the New Haven Free Public Library, where club members performed physic experiments while informing the public of the principles behind the experiment. “For the most part, we’ll just talk about general physics topics. Each week for most of the year, we’ll come in with a new topic like optics or thermodynamics. Right now we’re performing some experiments for middle schoolers in New Haven to get them interested in science. We’ve been working on picking the right demonstrations that we feel can be easily explained but are still fun to watch.” One goal Geller has is to not only learn more advanced topics about physics but also expressing his passion for this subject to other students and kids in his community.
