18-Year-Old Dublin Alum Could Win $400K Breakthrough Challenge Prize

DUBLIN, CA — Imagine if a 90-second YouTube video paid for your college education, and then some.

That is a very real possibility for Sahand Adibnia, an 18-year-old UC Berkeley freshman who graduated Dublin High School in 2022. He is one 16 finalists in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a global science video contest challenging young people to create a video that explains complex math and science concepts in a concise and entertaining way. His video was first one of 30 out of 2,400 worldwide to win a popular vote. Now, it will go through two more rounds of voting and assessment by some of the world’s top mathematicians to determine if it wins top prize.

It’s quite a prize. If Adibnia wins, he will receive a $250,000 college scholarship, Dublin High School will receive a $100,000 science lab, and his math teacher, Don Snedden, will receive a $50,000 scholarship - a grand total of $400,000 in prizes.

That’s math everyone can understand. Adibnia’s video explains math that’s a little trickier. Wth just a whiteboard and a marker, he uses integral calculus to explain how Gabriel’s Horn, a theoretical trumpet-shaped horn with an infinite surface area, has a volume of pi.

“But in my opinion, I still think it’s cooler that I can fill this horn with pie,” Adibnia says at the end of his video, before delving into a piece of apple pie.

“A lot of people who have watched the video tell me now every time I think of a pie, I think of your video, so I thought that was pretty cool. So ideally, they look into it more,” he told Patch. “But the reality is in 90 seconds you can’t explain any concept thoroughly enough that any person could explain it. My number one priority was to give the intro, show why Gabriel’s Horn is cool, show why the volume is finite.”

Adibnia loves chemistry, and started his own YouTube channel called “Foolish Chemist” at around the same time he made his Gabriel’s Horn video. But the contest didn’t allow chemistry videos, so he picked a topic he’d learn about in high school calculus that intrigued him.

At around the time Adibnia was preparing the video, he got COVID, which gave him plenty of time to film himself writing complex equations on the small whiteboard in his bedroom. He also worked on his chemistry channel Foolish Chemist, which aims for “inquiry-based and comedic chemistry experiments.”

“A lot of other chemistry channels on YouTube are about explaining known concepts, but what I wanted to try was doing sort of random experiments, just for fun, see what happens, and also explaining a bit of the concepts that I think are going on in those reactions,” he said. In a recent video, he wanted to see what would happen if you dissolve a dime in hydrochloric acid. He also tried mixing scrap metal with toxic acid, aluminum with acid, and even found a way to transform urine into milk. In the future, he wants to continue his channel, and work toward a career in chemistry research and education.

“I always wanted to start a channel, so the summer when I found the time to do the breakthrough challenge, it was almost like killing two birds with one stone,” he said. Knowing Adibnia, he’ll likely make a video soon describing the material of the stone, the velocity it was traveling, and how it managed to take out those two birds.