Bio

Taylor is an incoming junior at San Luis Obispo High School, in San Luis Obispo, California. She is a competitive chess player and is ranked as one of the top 50 girls in the United States. She enjoys school, Spanish, youth group, hanging out with friends, and, of course, mathematics. Taylor is also involved with a group in her community that works to fight modern-day slavery. She's unsure of her future, but hopes to make an impact on the world with mathematical contributions, ending human trafficking, or something completely different!

Project: Knight Paths

This Demonstration finds the shortest path for the knight to take from its starting square to the X, avoiding the pawns, and displays it on the board. To find the shortest path, the Demonstration takes the square the knight is on and uses it to create a graph of all of the paths it can take, removing any paths that connect to squares containing pawns. Each time a new square is selected, the new path begins at the previous destination and ends at the selected square. Although there may be other paths of the same length, there are never any paths shorter than the displayed path.