The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. It is “the most prestigious” mathematical competitions in the world. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except in 1980. More than 100 countries participate. Each country sends a team of up to six students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and observers.
Maxim Lvovich Kontsevich is a Russian and French mathematician and mathematical physicist. He is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. He received the Henri Poincaré Prize in 1997, the Fields Medal in 1998, the Crafoord Prize in 2008, the Shaw Prize and Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015.
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. In 2005, Perelman abruptly quit his research job at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, due to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. He lives in seclusion in Saint Petersburg, and has not accepted offers for interviews since 2006.
Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld, surname also romanized as Drinfel'd, is a renowned mathematician from the former USSR, who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the University of Chicago.
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.
In number theory, zero-sum problems are certain kinds of combinatorial problems about the structure of a finite abelian group. Concretely, given a finite abelian group G and a positive integer n, one asks for the smallest value of k such that every sequence of elements of G of size k contains n terms that sum to 0.
Imre Bennett Leader is a British mathematician, a professor in DPMMS at the University of Cambridge working in the field of combinatorics. He is also known as an Othello player.
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
Kannan Soundararajan is an India-born American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Before moving to Stanford in 2006, he was a faculty member at University of Michigan, where he had also pursued his undergraduate studies. His main research interest is in analytic number theory, particularly in the subfields of automorphic L-functions, and multiplicative number theory.
Luboš Motl is a Czech physicist and blogger. He was an assistant professor in physics at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. His scientific publications were focused on string theory. He is currently a visiting scholar at Rutgers in high energy physics.
In additive number theory, Kemnitz's conjecture states that every set of lattice points in the plane has a large subset whose centroid is also a lattice point. It was proved independently in the autumn of 2003 by Christian Reiher, then an undergraduate student, and Carlos di Fiore, then a high school student.
Artur Avila Cordeiro de Melo is a Brazilian and naturalized French mathematician working primarily in the fields of dynamical systems and spectral theory. He is one of the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal, being the first Latin American and lusophone to win such an award. He has been a researcher at both the IMPA and the CNRS. He has been a professor at the University of Zurich since September 2018.
Vincent Lafforgue is a French mathematician who is active in algebraic geometry, especially in the Langlands program, and a CNRS "Directeur de Recherches" at the Institute Fourier in Grenoble. He is the younger brother of Fields Medalist Laurent Lafforgue.
Elon Lindenstrauss is an Israeli mathematician, and a winner of the 2010 Fields Medal.
Lisa Sauermann is a mathematician from Germany known for her performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where in 2011 she had the single highest score. She won four gold medals (2008–2011) and one silver medal (2007) at the olympiad, representing Germany.
Ovidiu Vasile Savin is a Romanian-American mathematician who is active in the field of the partial differential equations.
Zdeněk Dvořák is a Czech mathematician specializing in graph theory.
Jacob Tsimerman is a Canadian mathematician at the University of Toronto specialising in number theory and related areas. He was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in the year 2015 in recognition for his work on the André–Oort conjecture and for his work in both analytic number theory and algebraic geometry.
Jeremy Adam Kahn is an American mathematician. He works on hyperbolic geometry, Riemann surfaces and complex dynamics.
