About Me

So your full name is Jarupon Sathirapongsasuti. Where do you get "Fah" from?

It's a Thai custom for parents to name their kid a nickname separate from a first name. "Fah" is my "given" nick name.

I saw a picture of you in a monk robe. Are you a monk?

No, I am not a monk. I was a monk for one month before coming to college. Becoming a monk for a short period of time is quite common in Thailand. In fact, it is an old time tradition that once a man turns twenty he should be ordained into the Sangha order as a sign of becoming an adult. This tradition is not widely observed anymore. In my case, I did it out of my own interest and initiative.

So ... you were in a frat?

Well... you just have to not think about "frat" in a sterotypical way. Stanford's Phi Psi, my fraternity, isn't quite like a typical frat that you may have in mind. Alcohol isn't such a big thing for us. We pride ourselves with our high academic standard; our average GPA is higher than Stanford's campus average and highest in any student organizations on campus (if you don't count those honor societies like Tao Beta Pi or Phi Beta Kappa). We also value respect, especially for opposite sex, and diversity: race, nationality, sexual orientation, and ideas. So, yes, I was in a frat, and I'm damn proud to be a Phi Psi.

I heard you are a celebrity in Thailand. Is that right?

Yes and no, depending on how you define "celebrity". Yes, I am known by many people. Some of them , perhaps most of them, I don't know. People sometimes would recognize me or my name or my work.

All this is because of a science project my friends and I did in my junior and senior years of high school. The project name is "Walking with A Millipede". It is an attempt to model how millipedes walk mathematically. We came up with an equation that predict position of millipede's legs as a function of time and the number of legs.

What get us famous was the fact that we won the first prize for interdisciplinary team project in the 2004 Intel ISEF (Intel International Science and Engineering Fair). We got to appear on many famous TV shows, made front page of the most famous national newspaper, got covered in countless number of newspapers and magazines, got interviewed by many radio shows, was recognized by the Prime Minister, was hailed by our school, the Science Society of Thailand, the Math Association, the Biology Association, the Physics Association, the Ministry of Science and Technology, even the royal family.

You wrote books?

In senior year of high school, I served as the president of my high school's mathematics club. Because our high school (Traim Udom Suksa School) was well-known, and we had a lot of talented math students in the club, we afforded the credibility to publish a handbook for high school's mathematics. I contributed a fair bit of the book and served as an editor. The book title is "lek" (literally "math"). The book was distributed by Chulalongkorn University Book Center, which has branches nationwide.

In summer between my high school and college, I had a couple of months free before college started, so me and my friends, who were free and also waiting for school to start, got together and wrote a book on how to get into American colleges. We did this to fill the gap for Thai students to learn about the specifics of American college admissions system. I was the editor and one of the main contributors of the book, so they put my name on the cover as "Jarupon Sathirapongsasuti and friends".

The book was published by Rakluke Family Group, a leading Thai publisher, and was distributed nationally by SE-ED. It was so well received that the publisher published it twice, and the book became a bestseller in educational category.