Karl Winsor named Churchill Scholar

Honors Mathematics and Computer Science undergraduate student Karl Winsor has been named a 2016-17 Churchill Scholar by the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States.

Established in 1959, the Winston Churchill Foundation was founded by American friends of Churchill, who wanted to fulfill his wish of always having gifted young American graduate students at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge with the goal of advancing science and technology on both sides of the Atlantic, helping to ensure our future prosperity and security. The Churchill Scholarship started in 1963 with three awards and has since grown to 15 awards. It provides funding to American students for a year of Master’s study in science, mathematics, and engineering at the University of Cambridge, based at Churchill College. The Churchill Scholarship has been called the most academically challenging of the UK scholarships.

Karl, from Ann Arbor, is involved with the Michigan Math Circle, a program that engages high school and middle school students in mathematics topics outside of the standard curriculum. He is co-president of the Society of Undergraduate Math Students and a member of Eta Kappa Nu. Karl enjoys attending quantum information processing seminars at Michigan and playing squash and the mandolin.

This past summer, Karl worked with Prof. Yaoyun Shi at Michigan on a project in quantum information theory, where one goal of his work was to establish special cases of the Area Law conjectures, which upper bound the amount of entanglement that can exist within many classes of naturally occurring quantum systems. The project was part of the 2015 Summer Undergraduate Research in Engineering (SURE) program.

The previous summer, Karl participated in the 2014 SMALL REU program at Williams College, where he did research on elliptic curves, L-functions, and random matrix theory.

Karl’s career goals are to obtain a Ph.D. in Mathematics, to conduct research in number theory and algebraic geometry, and to teach at the university level.

Karl is the second Michigan student with an EECS affiliation to have been selected for this honor; Nicholas Triantafillou (who was also a CS and Math dual degree student) was selected for the 2013-2014 academic year. In total, thirteen students from Michigan have now been named Churchill Scholars.