🇨🇦 Warren Bei

Warren Bei grew up in British Columbia, Canada, and came up through the intense, quietly competitive world of mathematical olympiad training. Long before he was a household name in that community, he was a young student drawn less to raw arithmetic than to the elegance of a well-constructed proof. He would later describe competition mathematics not as a contest of speed but as a way of learning to think, an argument he has returned to again and again when asked why the discipline mattered so much to him.

His international career began in 2021, when he represented Canada at the International Mathematical Olympiad held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and came home with a silver medal. It was an extraordinary debut for someone so young, and it marked the start of an unusually sustained run. Over the next four years he would return to the world's most demanding pre-university mathematics competition again and again, an experience most students get only once or twice.

In 2022, at the Olympiad in Oslo, Norway, Bei won his first gold medal with a score of 36. A year later, in Chiba, Japan, he took gold again with 40 points, edging ever closer to perfection. Each result deepened a reputation for calm, creative problem-solving under pressure. By the time he arrived at his final Olympiad, he was no longer a promising newcomer but a veteran expected to perform at the very top.

The 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad was held on Queensland's Sunshine Coast in Australia, with a record 110 countries competing. Across the two days and six problems, Bei did not drop a single point, finishing with a flawless 42. Five students in the world achieved a perfect score that year, the largest number since 2001. For Canada, it was only the sixth perfect score in the country's 45 years at the competition, an achievement rare enough that it drew notice even amid the noise about machine solvers.

His five-Olympiad haul of three golds and two silvers placed him second in Canada's all-time IMO hall of fame and tied for ninth in the world rankings of cumulative medallists. What made the perfect score resonate beyond the mathematics community was its timing: it arrived in the same summer that AI models were being celebrated for reaching gold-medal performance, and Bei's result was a reminder that a human teenager had, once again, done it first and done it perfectly.

His perfect score arrived at a charged moment for the discipline. That same summer, technology companies were trumpeting that their AI systems had reached gold-medal performance on the Olympiad, igniting debate about the future of human problem-solving. Against that backdrop, a Canadian high-school student quietly did the thing flawlessly, and did it first, a reminder that creative reasoning under exam pressure remains, for now, a distinctly human art.

The cumulative weight of his record is easy to understate. The International Mathematical Olympiad asks each competitor to solve six problems over two days, questions engineered to resist memorised technique and reward genuine insight. To medal even once is rare; to return for five straight years and improve from silver to gold to a perfect paper is the mark of sustained mastery rather than a single lucky morning.

Those results placed him among the most decorated young mathematicians his country has produced, second in Canada's all-time Olympiad hall of fame and tied for ninth in the global ranking of cumulative medallists. It was, the Canadian Mathematical Society noted, only the sixth perfect score by a Canadian in the nation's forty-five years at the competition, a distinction that outlives any single headline.

After the Olympiad, Bei enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to continue studying mathematics. Asked what competitions had given him, he has said they taught him to stay a creative, curious learner and introduced him to entire fields he might never have found in a classroom. His advice to younger competitors distils a career into a sentence: for every solution that looks unmotivated, there is a deeper insight waiting that makes the whole thing feel obvious.