Alex Song wouldn’t describe his latest win at the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) as a big deal, but the 18-year old has made history. In last week’s international competition, Song earned his fifth gold medal becoming the all-time top contestant in the IMO’s 56-year history.
Zhuo Gun (Alex) Song began competing in mathematics in Grade 1, quickly developing a taste for the subject. Six years later, Song was shortlisted for the Canadian team, ranking 1st in Canada that year and making a splash on the international scene.
“We knew he was good, but we didn’t know he was top of the world,” said his mother, Jessica, in an interview with The Waterloo Record.
Prior to this year’s competition, Song had participated in five consecutive IMOs but never came home with a perfect score. Few ever do.
The IMO is held every year and is attended by more than 600 of the world’s top teenage mathematicians. Competitors have two days to complete six questions, but these aren’t your average SAT-level challenges. The questions are so demanding that Edward Wang, a retired mathematics professor and friend of the Songs, admitted to the Globe and Mail that neither he nor most of his colleagues could have answered them correctly.
One of the questions used at this year’s IMO (www.imo-official.org).
The question on everyone’s mind: what does the future hold for Alex Song? Having graduated from his high school in New Hampshire, Song intends to pursue pure mathematics at Princeton University in the fall.* In his spare time, he enjoys playing bridge and chess, solving Rubik’s Cubes, and playing the piano.
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