During the summer 2021, I was contacted by a high-school student from Newbury Park High School, Tyler King. In his email Tyler said that over the previous summer (2020) he completed a research project on pathfinding algorithms, and that he wanted to share his results with me.
Tyler and I discussed his paper online, and I was really impressed with his work which he titled: Minimum Path Star Topology Algorithms for Weighted Regions and Obstacles. I gave Tyler some feedback, but the work was original and interesting – Tyler’s incredible mathematical maturity made me think that I was lucky to be engaging with a modern day Évariste Galois!
We met a few times, and Tyler invited me to be his co-author, although the work in the paper is his. Tyler is now a student at Cornell university, and his work can be read here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06944.