(L-R): Maxime Buck, Moritz Rohner;
Credit: FJSL
At the recent Taiwan International Science Fair (TISF) held in Taipei, Luxembourg students won some of the top prizes.
Maxime Buck (18, Lycée Michel Rodange) won 1st prize in the "computer science and information engineering" category, and Moritz Rohner (17, Lycée de Garçons Esch) won 2nd prize in the "physics and astronomy" category.
TISF is one of the most prestigious science and technology competitions for secondary school students in the world. Under the aegis of the National Taiwan Science Education Center, it brought together 430 competitors from 30 countries, including Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan, from 20 to 25 January 2025.
These budding researchers and engineers presented 250 innovative research and development projects in twelve categories (mathematics - chemistry - animal sciences - plant sciences - biochemistry - medicine and health sciences - engineering - social and behavioural sciences - physics and astronomy - earth and environmental sciences - computer science and information engineering - environmental engineering).
To fly the flag for Luxembourg, two talented candidates, Maxime Buck and Moritz Rohner, were selected by the jury of the Jonk Fuerscher national competition in March 2024 and supported on their journey by Paul Wurth SA and the Fondation Jeunes Scientifiques Luxembourg (FJSL).
For his computer science project entitled “M.I.R.A.S.”, Maxime designed an innovative prototype system of small identical robots capable of self-assembling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXbCXtL-iA4). His achievement earned him a prize of 5,000 Taiwanese dollars (€145), and once again demonstrated his virtuosity in new technologies. Maxime had already won a couple of prizes at the Jonk Fuerscher 2023 and at the American ISEF 2023 competitions, with a project called “Marble VR”, which involved developing a virtual reality marble run video game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ldA4rs477E).
Moritz Rohner was also a prize winner of the Jonk Fuerscher competition and a participant at ISEF in 2023: it was once again his passion for theoretical physics that led him to tackle a singular quantum physics problem: "Can a Quantum Mechanical Two-State Theory model Coulomb's Force?" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1vmpcZAjuE). In doing so, Moritz drew inspiration from the work of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, demonstrating his great scientific maturity, both conceptually and formally. In addition to a week of cultural activities on the other side of the world, this feat earned him the modest sum of 3,000 Taiwanese dollars (€87)… But in his own words: "Beyond the competition, this trip was a unique opportunity to discover other cultures, establish international friendships and understand, thanks to Taipei high school students, what makes Taiwan unique".
In addition, via a symmetrical exchange agreement, the FJSL awarded two special "LISE - Luxembourg International Science Expo" prizes during the TISF final ceremony, i.e. the opportunity for two outstanding Taiwanese students to take part in a non-competitive scientific and cultural fair organised annually in the Grand Duchy by the FJSL in the autumn of 2025:
- Liu Cheng-Chien with a mathematics project "The Expected Length of Randomly Generated Bidirectional Series";
- Chen Hsin-Ai with an engineering project "Enhancing Sweat Sensing Sensitivity with Smart Hydrophilic Thin Films".
