As a high school senior taking Advanced Placement biology and calculus, Maxwell Bileschi designed a software program that fused his love of math with evolutionary biology.

The result: a simulation-style game in which the player is a plant that must ration biological resources, from leaves and bark to glucose and water, to remain alive.

Max sold his creation to an Australian educational software company during his freshman year at UB with the help of Michael Buckley, director of UB’s nationally recognized Center for Socially Relevant Computing.

“It was ‘selling software 101,’” Max says of Buckley’s crash course on intellectual property.

A junior majoring in math and computer science and engineering, Max is an Honors scholar with a 4.0 grade-point average. He is taking graduate courses and hopes to earn a master’s degree in math—all in just four years.

In his sophomore year, he was one of 275 students nationally to win the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, a prestigious award for undergraduates in mathematics, the sciences and engineering.

Max’s biology game helped him get into the university’s selective URGE to Compute program—a one-year apprenticeship in computational mathematics and mathematical sciences that the National Science Foundation funds.

He started the program as a freshman. Typical apprentices are juniors.

As part of URGE, Max joined a small, applied mathematics working group led by mathematics professor Thomas Cusick.

Cusick saw Max’s potential right away as they began work on cryptography, a field involving math, computer science and electrical engineering, with applications in Internet security and data encryption.

“Max is an exceptional student,” Cusick says. “I gave him a book on abstract algebra to get him up to speed, and he soaked up a semester’s worth of graduate-level material in just three weeks.”

URGE challenged Max intellectually, helped him make friends and exposed him to such research resources as the Center for Computational Research.

Not content to stay buried in books, Max finds time for the UB Schussmeisters Ski Club and intramural sports. He also continues to enjoy music—his longtime passion—as a DJ on UB’s student-run radio station, WRUB.