Vishnu Kannan had just begun learning math as an early elementary school student in Howard County when his older brother came to him with a math problem. If he could solve it, he’d earn a dozen doughnuts. But the problem was actually one of math’s great mysteries — the Collatz Conjecture — that had gone unanswered despite decades of mathematicians’ efforts. Kannan never got the doughnuts, but instead earned a love for math and an obsession with problem-solving.
It was this hunger that led Kannan, now 17 and a senior at River Hill High School in Columbia, to sell his artificial intelligence startup for $2 million in stock last year, when he was only 16.
Though Kannan couldn’t reach the answer to his brother’s problem, he stubbornly sat with it for a few days, then returned to his brother asking, “What’s the deal?”…