ARTICLE: Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics

[Ryan Goble]

The print subtitle for this article was "May the Best Nerd Win" - This feature about the International Olympiad in Informatics is a great read if, like me, your not a part of this algorithm you will enjoy this feature from the Dec 2010 issue of Wired Magazine.

Photo: Michael Schmelling

Neal Wu’s last chance for international glory, and maybe America’s, too, begins with a sound like a hippo crunching through a field of dry leaves—the sound of 315 computer prodigies at 315 workstations ripping into 315 gray envelopes in unison. “You have five hours,” a voice booms across the packed gymnasium. “Good luck.”

At his desk on the gym floor, Wu, age 18, pushes his glasses up on his nose and squints. He shouldn’t need luck. This is a coding competition—the International Olympiad in Informatics, held in August at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada—and Wu is one of the world’s top competition programmers.

He just graduated from Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana; his parents are chemical engineers originally from Shanghai, although Wu was born in the US. In seventh grade, he took first place in a nationwide contest for middle schoolers called Mathcounts. (There’s a Neal Wu fan club on Facebook that celebrates his “awesome math skills.”) Yet according to Rob Kolstad, the US team’s 57-year-old head coach, Wu is merely “very good” at math. His true gift is for creative problem-solving with code. In 2008, the first year he competed at the IOI, he finished 10th out of 300 contestants. In 2009, he moved up to seventh place. Since then, he has competed in six coding contests run by Kolstad’s organization, the USA Computing Olympiad; he won three of them with perfect scores. Wu has the relaxed disposition of a star athlete; he’s confident without ever letting on that he is America’s Great Nerd Hope. “I hate to say he’s the Tiger Woods of computer programming,” Kolstad says, “but he shares the properties of cool, calm under pressure, and consistent, consistent performance.”

Read the full feature HERE.