Veljko Toljić, winner of the award for the best student of the University of Novi Sad, at only 22 years old is the author of several scientific papers and a participant in prestigious research programs in Canada and Serbia.
When as a boy of only eight years old he discovered the possibility of writing macros in the Power Point program, Veljko Toljić was not thinking about science, awards, and an academic career. He was only interested in understanding how a computer works.
-In one presentation I found a command for writing macros and that is where the magic began. Without the internet, I learned to program in “Visual Basic”. I made various logical things and I never had a problem understanding how a computer thinks – Veljko recalls.
Years later, this twenty-two-year-old is the winner of the “Best Student of the University of Novi Sad” award. He is a first-year master’s student at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics of the Faculty of Sciences, and behind him he already has scientific papers, international internships, competition awards, and collaboration with researchers from around the world.
In elementary school, he discovered informatics competitions, and very quickly began representing Serbia at the most significant international contests. He won medals at the Junior Balkan Olympiad in Informatics, the European Junior Olympiad in Informatics, and the “John Atanasoff” tournament in Bulgaria.
-Somewhere in the third grade of high school, I realized that mathematics interested me much more than informatics. I started dealing with programming because it seemed like better combinatorics to me, but that path eventually led me to theoretical mathematics – says this young talent.
At the Faculty of Sciences in Novi Sad, already in his first year of studies, he entered the world of scientific research. A fateful moment was a seminar on modern combinatorics led by Professor Dr. Dragan Mašulović.
-At one lecture, the professor asked us if we wanted to continue with the material or to hear about an open problem that he would be working on during his stay in Toronto. We chose the latter. To me, that problem was immediately fascinating – says our interlocutor.
Veljko dedicated six months to solving a problem that had been open for years in the scientific community, which is not rare in mathematics, but as he says, alongside that task, he also performed other daily duties. After two months of work, he realized that the problem was not of a combinatorial but of a geometric nature, which opened up a completely new direction of research, which was also when he made the greatest breakthrough.
He is the author of several scientific papers and an active collaborator in several research groups. A special place in his career so far is held by his participation in the prestigious FUSRP 2024 program at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto. In Canada, he worked on a project that connected combinatorics and mathematical physics.
At the same time, he was a participant in the “Research Internship of the Mathematical Institute of SANU 2024”, where he worked on problems in algebraic combinatorics. Veljko is a multiple invited lecturer at the Student Seminar of the Mathematical Institute of SANU and a junior associate at the Mathematics Seminar at the Petnica Science Center. Throughout his studies, he maintained a grade point average of 10.0.
-I like problems that look simple the most. When it seems to everyone that the solution must be easy, and then it turns out that an entire new mathematics stands behind the question. That is when it becomes truly interesting – Veljko Toljić says with a smile.
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Source: Telegraf; Photo: Storyteller.rs