Melbourne Student Aces Mathematical Olympiad
This story has just come across the H3 desk:
“A student from Melbourne, Australia, has just achieved a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad in South Africa, winning a gold medal for the second year in a row. Seventeen-year-old maths genius Alex Gunning, who is in his Junior year (Year 11) at Glen Waverley Secondary College, was one of more than 500 contestants from 103 countries competing at the prestigious event in Cape Town.
The event consisted of two four-and-a-half-hour exams, each with three questions. Alex was one of only three students to achieve the perfect score and win a gold medal.
Australian Mathematics Trust supporter Adam Spencer said Alex’s results were a “once-in-a-generation achievement” and a “triumph of great genius but also real application“. “What Alex has done, six questions, seven out of seven on each, 42 out of 42 is an incredible achievement.”
Alex said while the questions were not particularly difficult to understand, they were “really, really hard to solve“.
“The reason why we have four-and-a-half hours for them is that there’s no set way to approach these questions … you have no idea how to do them when you first see them,” he told ABC news in Melbourne.
On an international level, it was extremely rare for a student to win two gold medals at the event and Alex was just the second Australian to do so, after Peter McNamara in 2000 and 2001.
Alex was the first Australian to get a perfect score twice.” Full article here.
