🇺🇸 Liam Reddy

The path to the United States IMO team is long and entirely public. It begins with the American Mathematics Competitions, which draw roughly 300,000 students from more than 6,000 schools every year. Strong scorers advance to the American Invitational Mathematics Examination, then to the USA Mathematical Olympiad, a proof-based examination rather than a multiple-choice one. From there a few dozen students are invited to the Mathematical Olympiad Program, the summer training camp run by the Mathematical Association of America, and six are selected for the team. The funnel is roughly fifty thousand to one.

The IMO itself is two papers on consecutive days, four and a half hours each, three problems per paper, seven points per problem. There is no calculator, no reference material and no partial exam — a contestant either produces a complete proof or does not. The subject areas are algebra, combinatorics, geometry and number theory, and the difficulty comes from the fact that each problem is designed to be unsolvable by routine method. Scripts are marked jointly by the host coordinators and the contestant's own team leaders, and a proof with an unjustified step loses points regardless of whether its conclusion is correct.

The 67th edition was staged by Shanghai High School from 10 to 21 July 2026 — the first time a secondary school had hosted the competition in its sixty-seven-year history — and broke the records for both participating countries and number of contestants. Seven students in the whole field scored perfectly. Three were Chinese, two American, one Korean and one British. Reddy, in his first appearance, was one of them.

The 2026 United States team took four golds, one silver and one bronze, and finished second of 117 teams. Alongside Reddy were Alexander Wang, eighteen, of New Jersey, at his fourth IMO; Ruilin "Calvin" Wang, eighteen, of Virginia, at his second; Royce Yao, eighteen, of Arizona; Feodor Yevtushenko, eighteen, of California, who took silver; and Oron Wang, seventeen, of New Jersey, who took bronze. The team leader was Dr John Berman and the deputy leader was Yang Liu; the delegation was sponsored by Jane Street.

Being the youngest contestant on a national team is a specific kind of position. The IMO is open to students who have not begun university and are under twenty, so a sixteen-year-old who makes a team is usually competing against opponents with two or three more years of training and, often, two or three previous IMOs behind them. Experience matters at this level in a way that is easy to underestimate: the ability to recognise a problem's shape quickly, to allocate the four and a half hours across three problems, and to know when to abandon a promising line is largely learned in the room.

Reddy's result therefore reads two ways. As a score it is the maximum: nothing above it exists. As a trajectory it means he has, in principle, three more years of eligibility. The United States has finished in the top two at the IMO repeatedly over the last decade, and the students who anchor those teams are typically the ones who qualified young and returned. Beyond the medal table, the practical consequence of a perfect IMO score is that it is one of the very few secondary-school credentials that research mathematicians read directly, without translation.