🇻🇳 Vu Nguyen Nguyen

The International Physics Olympiad has two examinations, held on separate days, each five hours long. The theoretical paper carries thirty of the fifty available marks and consists of three long problems, each broken into parts that build on one another. The experimental paper carries twenty and is conducted at a bench: contestants are given apparatus and a task, and are marked on measurement, error analysis and the written treatment of uncertainty as much as on the final number. It is common for a strong theoretician to lose the overall lead in the laboratory.

The theory problems are not textbook exercises. They are typically built around a physical situation the contestant has never seen — a mechanical system with an unusual constraint, a thermodynamic cycle with a twist, an electromagnetic configuration that has to be reduced before it can be solved — and every part is marked against a published scheme that awards points for intermediate results. Thirty out of thirty therefore means not one dropped sub-part across three multi-hour problems, including the algebraic manipulation, the limiting cases and the numerical evaluation.

The 56th IPhO ran from 4 to 12 July 2026 in Bucaramanga, Colombia, with 381 contestants from more than eighty countries. The jury awarded 51 gold medals, 80 silver, 97 bronze and 65 honourable mentions. The absolute winner — the highest total score in the competition — was Juha Oh of South Korea. Vu Nguyen Nguyen is listed among the gold medallists in the IPhO results database, where his name is entered in the reversed order used by that database.

Vietnam's five-member delegation returned with four golds and one silver, the country's best result in the competition's history, and finished seventh overall — its first ever top-seven placing. The other gold medallists were Nguyen Nhat Minh of the High School for the Gifted at Vietnam National University in Hanoi, who was the second contestant to score 30/30 in theory; Ta Ngoc Minh, a twelfth-grader from Bac Ninh; and Nguyen Thi Bich Ngoc, a twelfth-grader from Le Hong Phong High School in Ninh Binh. Le Duy Khanh, an eleventh-grader from Lam Son High School in Thanh Hoa, took silver.

Three of the five Vietnamese contestants were in the eleventh grade, which is unusual — most national teams are dominated by students in their final year, because the physics required extends well past the school syllabus and is normally accumulated over several years of olympiad training. It also means the delegation is likely to return largely intact. Vietnam was additionally one of the few teams in Bucaramanga to field two female contestants.

The Hanoi–Amsterdam High School for the Gifted, where Vu Nguyen Nguyen studies, is one of a small number of specialist secondary schools in Vietnam whose entrance examinations select nationally rather than by district, and which run subject-specific streams from the tenth grade. Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training announced the Bucaramanga result publicly. The perfect theory score was the detail the announcement led with, because it was the first of its kind in forty-five years of Vietnamese participation.