China Science
China loses maths Olympiad to US but genius student Shi Haojia remains on top of the game
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16-year-old’s perfect score is a repeat of his success last year and makes him the fourth Chinese competitor to achieve the record
Dannie Peng in Beijing
Published: 2:00pm, 23 Jul 2024
China lost its sixth consecutive International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) on Monday, trailing the US by two points, but young genius Shi Haojia once again achieved a perfect score in the world’s premier high school maths competition.
The 16-year-old topped the individual rankings for the second year in a row to win another gold medal and become the fourth Chinese competitor to achieve this record, following in the footsteps of mathematical whizz Wei Dongyi.
Haojia, from the eastern province of Zhejiang, scored a perfect seven points in each of the competition’s six problems – the only one to do so out of the 609 students from 108 countries who gathered in Bath, Britain for the 65th IMO.
In the team rankings, the US took first place with 192 points while the Chinese team came second, with a total score of 190.
Since the first IMO was held in 1959 in Romania with teams from seven countries taking part, the competition has gradually expanded to more than 100 countries from five continents, with each country sending a team of up to six high school students.
China has maintained a competitive momentum at the event over the past three decades, winning its first title in 1989 and taking the top spot a total of 24 times.
Haojia is a second-year student at the privately owned Hailiang Senior High School in the city of Shaoxing, Zhejiang. His competition coach Zhang Xiaoming, who is also the school’s principal, last year described him as a rare mathematical genius.
In an article published by the school after Haojia’s achievement at the 2023 IMO, Zhang said that if the student had an outstanding characteristic, “it is that his driving force for learning comes from his love for mathematics rather than other external things”.
According to publicly available information, Haojia was born in a rural part of the central inland province of Henan, moving to Zhejiang when he was nine years old.
He showed a keen interest and talent for mathematics from a very young age. While he was still a primary school student, Haojia was already helping his junior high school sister with her maths homework.
At the age of 10, he won a gold medal in a national primary school maths competition. His gift for maths was discovered when he was in grade 5, and since then he has been trained for maths competitions.
In 2021, Haojia was selected for the YAU Mathematical Sciences Leaders Programme at Tsinghua University, which recruits middle and high school students with outstanding potential from around the world and trains them from undergraduate to doctoral studies.
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Robotics scientist Geng Tao, who used to work at a British university and is now the founder of a start-up, said China’s loss of first place this time was likely to be temporary.
He said China had a large talent pool, and Chinese families tended to take such competitions more seriously.
Geng said the Chinese government was also more willing to mobilise the country’s resources to achieve certain goals – such as winning gold medals at the Olympics – which would also help the country maintain its lead in the mathematics race in the long run.
According to Geng, students from China and India also showed more interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) than their US counterparts, who were more likely to major in subjects such as finance, law and medicine.
China is a main source of STEM talent, producing a large number of scientists, engineers and technicians working in the US today.
But despite China’s impressive performance, some academics – including Chinese-American mathematician Yau Shing-Tung – warn that the country still lagged the United States in mathematics research.
Speaking in April on the status and future of Chinese mathematics, Yau, who retired from Harvard University in 2022 to teach full-time at Tsinghua University, said China’s level of maths research had not yet reached that of the US in the 1940s.
