The Wiz

Actually, the listing says "Twelfth-Place in World." This was for something called Odyssey of the Mind, which is one of the many competitions that exist as a kind of subculture for the smartest high school students around the country. The best known of these is probably the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, in which Elizabeth placed ninth and received a $10,000 scholarship, but there are plenty of others too. There is the SuperQuest national supercomputing challenge, in which a team consisting of Elizabeth and three other Blair students placed first, winning for their school a free year of access to a supercomputer. There is the American Regions Mathematics League, in which Elizabeth scored so high on tests that she was selected to go to Russia as part of a math exchange program. The competitions go on and on, all year round, all with their differences and one common characteristic: For years they have largely been the province of boys.

Which Elizabeth knows as well as anyone. After being named one of the top 10 Westinghouse winners, she volunteered that gender might have had something to do with the results, that the judges might have seen in her a way to send a signal that girls can do well too. Never mind that the first-place winner was a girl, which might be signal enough; this was how Elizabeth said she felt, and no wonder -- every year, every month, every week seems to bring another study detailing how dismal things are for females in math and science and how they need to be encouraged. One study says that the number of women going into either field is "disproportionately low." Another says that "gender differences in science achievement are not decreasing but increasing." Another says that although girls have as much ability as boys, they often start developing sour attitudes toward math and science in middle school and soon lose all interest. Others say that's because in classrooms boys dominate, that girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong, that eventually girls reach the point where they not only don't do well but decide they're incapable.

On and on the studies go, endlessly on, all making the same points about how lousy things are for females. Math, it seems, eventually becomes nothing more than a skill to balance a checkbook, while science, horrible science, becomes a nauseating memory of formaldehyde and some frogs. And meanwhile, at Blair High School, in the midst of all of this, held up constantly as proof of what girls can be, is Elizabeth.

There are other girls in Blair's magnet (about one-third of the 400 students are female), but as Mary Ellen Verona says of even the best ones, "They're pretty sharp, but Elizabeth's always going to come out on top." A few might be smarter in a particular subject on a particular day, but as Mike Haney, who ran the magnet program until going on leave last year, says, "I suppose if there's any Renaissance person at Blair High School, it's Elizabeth."

She wins science awards. She wins math awards. She wins computing awards. She wins writing awards. She is co-editor of the school paper. She has a 4.0 grade-point average. She speaks French, and some German, and Basic, and Fortran and Pascal.

And her resume is actually four pages long.

SHE IS ONLY 17, so there isn't that much of a life story to tell, but this is the outline so far:

She was born in Philadelphia in 1975, the first child of Jim Mann, who was pre-med at Harvard before deciding to become a journalist, and Carolyn Dexter, a professor of classical literature, who grew up thinking she would go to MIT until the day she confided this to her favorite uncle, "and he laughed and said, 'Girls can't go there, don't be silly,' and I never breathed that thought to another person."

The family moved here in 1977, settling in Silver Spring in a house not far from Blair. From first through third grade, Elizabeth attended an elementary school that offered a French immersion program. Then, because of Jim's job as a correspondent with the Los Angeles Times, the family moved to China, where Elizabeth attended grades four through six. Then she came back to the math-and-science magnet program at Takoma Park Intermediate, where she had a teacher named Darlyn Counihan, who pushed and pushed her into joining the school's math team and remembers her blossoming into someone "brighter than I am, or ever was." And then it was on to Blair, where Steve Chien, who has known Elizabeth since seventh grade, who remembers writing an essay then in which he used the word humankind rather than mankind, who remembers Elizabeth seeing that word and drawing a smiley face next to it, says she has become:

"The Darling."

"A good diplomat," is what her father says of her.

"Totally cooperative," says her mother. "She's obliging, obedient. She's everything our school system rewards.