BEATING THE BEE
At age 14, O’Dorney won the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee after days of grueling competition.
With the help of his mother, O’Dorney had studied the dictionary for two years before the Bee. He analyzed spelling patterns from French and German and compiled notebooks filled with difficult words. O’Dorney’s highly accurate photographic memory helped him build his tremendous vocabulary.
O’Dorney says he entered the Bee believing that he had a good chance of winning. He remained stoic and calm throughout the famously stressful competition, teaching himself to juggle to drown out distractions from reporters and the audience.
Today, O’Dorney juggles in his free time and seems to be as proud of his Spelling Bee win as he is of his ability to keep four balls in the air—if only for 30 seconds.
But after devoting so much time to mastering orthography, O’Dorney finds rote memorization tiresome and dislikes the garbled logic of the “awkward” English language.
“I was a lot less mature then,” O’Dorney says.
Nevertheless, O’Dorney is proud of his complex and colorful vocabulary, likening proper spelling to the ability to speak foreign languages.
“For Evan, words have very precise definitions,” says Nicholas R. Nardini, O’Dorney’s proctor in Canaday. “It’s always a challenge to match his verbal precision.”
O’Dorney even offered to spell-check this article before it went to print.
NUMBER ONE
Though O’Dorney has demonstrated a phenomenal capacity for memorization, he says his true passion lies in mathematics.
Last year, O’Dorney won the Intel Science competition—a prestigious national contest—for his simple formula to approximate square roots.
A Stanford professor presented a mathematical dilemma to O’Dorney after attempts to solve the problem with a team of graduate students had failed.
O’Dorney devoted the summer after ninth grade to tackling the problem, and within two weeks, he had found a solution. Two months later, he had ironed out the details to streamline the proof into the cleaner and simpler formula that would eventually win the science competition.
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