Nishant Dhankhar of DPS RK Puram was awarded Pradhan Mantri Rastriya Bal Puraskar, the highest civilian award for under the age of 18 by Hon’ble President of India on 22nd Jan 2019. This was followed by facilitation and interaction by Hon’ble Prime Minister and Minister of Women and child development at 7th Lok Kalyan Marg. He was also part of the Republic Day Parade at Rajpath in 2019. The award carried a medal, cash prize of one lakh rupees, citation, certificate and a book voucher worth ten thousand rupees.Nishant Dhankhar received the award for his outstanding achievements in the field of scholastics. He is a gifted mathematics genius and has won various awards nationally and internationally.
He proved the analogue of Szemeredi’s theorem on the existence of a colored rectangle if some points in the plane are colored with positive density. The proof was further generalised and proved for higher dimensions using the bounds on nxn lattice and cuboid. This analogue for cuboids and higher dimensions relates to a generalisation to Zarankiewicz problem, an unsolved problem of extremal graph theory. He represented India at Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2018 held in Pittsburgh, USA. He won the Mu Alpha Theta award for the most challenging, original and creative investigation of a problem involving mathematics accessible to a high school student at the IRIS National Science Fair,2017. The passion for deep consideration of challenging problems led him to participate in the 29th Summer Conference of the International Mathematical Tournament of Towns held at Adyghe, Russia where he was awarded Diploma for working on the project ‘Van der Waerden’s Theorem and Games’. He made India proud by winning Gold Ruler at Iranian Geometry Olympiad and silver medal in Asia Pacific Mathematics Olympiad.
