🇺🇸 Ruilin Wang

The two scoresheets

In 2025, on Australia's Sunshine Coast, Wang scored 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 1 for a total of 36 and rank 12. In 2026, in Shanghai, the line reads 7, 7, 4, 7, 7, 7 for 39 and joint ninth place.

The difference is instructive. In 2025 the last problem, traditionally the hardest of the competition, yielded a single point. In 2026 it was fully solved, and the four-point deduction came instead on the third problem, the hardest of the first day.

What separates 39 from 42

Three points. In Shanghai, seven contestants wrote perfect papers, and Wang's 39 placed him joint ninth, within a handful of marks of the top of the table in the largest field in this record.

Olympiad marking explains where those three points went. Coordinators read each proof as written and award partial credit for genuine progress; a four out of seven means the substance of an argument was there and something in it did not close. It is the difference between solving a problem and proving it to the standard the competition requires.

The American team's 2026

Two of the seven perfect papers in Shanghai were American, written by Liam Reddy and Alexander Wang. With Ruilin Wang joint ninth on 39, the United States put three contestants inside the top nine of a field of 666.

Team standings at the olympiad are the unofficial sum of six individual scores, so a top-heavy team result of that kind is what decides the country table. In the years covered by this file, American contestants also wrote perfect papers in 2019, twice, and in 2023.

Back-to-back gold

Medals are allocated by proportion rather than by a fixed mark: at most half the field receives one, in roughly a one to two to three ratio of gold to silver to bronze, which places gold at about one contestant in twelve.

Winning it in two consecutive years means being inside that band against two different papers set by two different problem committees, which is a stronger claim than any single year's score. Wang's ranks, twelfth and then joint ninth, put him inside the world's top dozen both times.

What is documented, and what is not

Documented by the olympiad's official database: both years, both host cities, the field sizes of 630 and 666, the United States as his country, the per-problem scores, the totals, the ranks and the two gold medals.

Not documented: his age or date of birth, which is why this page carries no birth year; his school or state; and anything about him outside the competition. The name is also not uncommon, so readers should treat pages that attach a university or a career to it without a citation as unreliable.

One further limit is worth stating. The olympiad is open only to students in secondary education, so a contestant's record there closes the moment they leave school, usually without any public notice. Two golds in successive years may well be the whole of the public file on Ruilin Wang, and nothing in these sources indicates what came next.