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 competition in the world. Winning in IMO is widely regarded as the greatest feat for any high school student. 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.
The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in the United States and Canada. It awards a scholarship and cash prizes ranging from $250 to $2,500 for the top students and $5,000 to $25,000 for the top schools, plus one of the top five individual scorers is awarded a scholarship of up to $12,000 plus tuition at Harvard University, the top 100 individual scorers have their names mentioned in the American Mathematical Monthly, and the names and addresses of the top 500 contestants are mailed to all participating institutions. It is widely considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the world, and its difficulty is such that the median score is often zero despite being attempted by students specializing in mathematics.
Noam David Elkies is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. At the age of 26, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard. He is also a pianist, chess national master and a chess composer.
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.
Miller Smith Puckette is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for authoring Max, a graphical development environment for music and multimedia synthesis, which he developed while working at IRCAM in the late 1980s. He is also the author of Pure Data (Pd), a real-time performing platform for audio, video and graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities.
Reid William Barton is a mathematician and also one of the most successful performers in the International Science Olympiads.
Ravi D. Vakil is a Canadian-American mathematician working in algebraic geometry.
Felix Earl Browder was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Society until 2000. His two younger brothers also became notable mathematicians, William Browder and Andrew Browder.
Daniel Mertz Kane is an American mathematician. He is an associate professor with a joint position in the Mathematics Department and the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego.
Bjorn Mikhail Poonen is a mathematician, four-time Putnam Competition winner, and a Distinguished Professor in Science in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is primarily in arithmetic geometry, but he has occasionally published in other subjects such as probability and computer science. He has edited two books.
Jordan Stuart Ellenberg is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research involves arithmetic geometry. He is also an author of both fiction and non-fiction writing.
Lenhard Ng is an American mathematician, working primarily on symplectic geometry. Ng is a professor of mathematics at Duke University.
Ömer Cerrahoğlu is a Romanian child prodigy in mathematics. At the age of 14 years, 80 days, he won a gold medal at the 2009 International Mathematical Olympiad, making him the third-youngest gold medalist in IMO history, behind Terence Tao and Raúl Chávez Sarmiento.
Aaron C. Pixton is an American mathematician at the University of Michigan. He works in enumerative geometry, and is also known for his chess playing, where he is a FIDE Master.
Michael Jeffrey Larsen is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington.
Ioana Dumitriu is a Romanian-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include the theory of random matrices, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and game theory.
Jeremy Adam Kahn is an American mathematician. He works on hyperbolic geometry, Riemann surfaces and complex dynamics.
Eva Love Vivalt is a Canadian economist. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto and the director of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.
Greta Cvetanova Panova is a Bulgarian-American mathematician. She is a professor of mathematics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her research interests include combinatorics, probability and theoretical computer science.
