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A 14-year-old boy devises a computer program to make apps run faster

NOEL KING, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Noel King. Fourteen-year-old Akilan Sankaran is on his school's track team. He plays the piano, the flute and the drums. And yet he still found time to devise a computer program that makes your apps run faster. His program calculates anti-prime numbers, which are used in everyday software, and his discoveries won him the top prize in the Broadcom Masters, which is an engineering competition for middle school kids. His next goal is to become an astrophysicist.

It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.