🇻🇳 Nguyen Nhat Minh

Nguyen Nhat Minh is a student in the specialist physics track at the High School for Gifted Students, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. At the 2026 International Physics Olympiad, held from 4 to 12 July in Bucaramanga, Colombia, he won a gold medal and scored a perfect 30 out of 30 on the theoretical examination. He was seventeen.

He was one of only two contestants at the entire competition to achieve that theory score. The other was Vu Nguyen Nguyen, an eleventh-grader from Hanoi-Amsterdam High School for the Gifted. According to Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training it was the first time the Vietnamese team had produced two perfect theory scores in the same year.

Those results carried Vietnam's five-member team to a top-seven finish among the eighty-five competing countries and territories — the best result in the country's Olympiad history. The team's haul of four golds and one silver equalled Vietnam's 2017 total, but no Vietnamese contestant that year had scored full marks on theory. Assoc. Prof. Nguyen Cong Toan, a vice principal at Minh's school who has worked with Olympiad students for fifteen years, noted that perfect theory scores are extremely rare even for powerhouse teams such as China's.

Minh's route there was consistent rather than sudden. He picked up physics in middle school, drawn to it because it explained natural phenomena, and by eighth grade he was leading the physics team in what was then Hanoi's Long Bien District. He entered his gifted high school as the only one of more than six hundred applicants to score a perfect ten on the subject entrance exam.

In the 2026 cycle he won first prize at Vietnam's national student competition, cleared the ministry's regional and international selection rounds, then took silver at the Asian Physics Olympiad in May 2026, finishing top of the Vietnamese team. The Olympiad squad trained together at Hanoi National University of Education.

His preparation was methodical rather than mysterious, and worth recording precisely because it was. He worked through years of past Asian and international papers, studying how each question was constructed and how to extract the key data from very long problems. For the practical section he stayed in the laboratory past the dormitory curfew and slept there on some nights. He aimed to be asleep before 12:30 a.m. and was usually the first on the team to turn in, often telling teammates to rest.

Both Olympiad papers run five hours. Minh found the 2026 questions gentler than in previous years, built around familiar phenomena. The essay-based theory paper opened with a mechanics problem split into three scenarios — his strongest area. The final theory question asked him to prove a formula linking magnetism and heat; he rated it the hardest and spent an hour weighing approaches before committing to his own. Mechanics, optics and calculation-heavy problems are his strengths; abstract questions about the universe give him the most trouble.

The practical exam was less smooth. A broken water valve in his apparatus cost about ten minutes while organisers repaired it, and he judged one of his results well off the true value. His teacher, who has taught him since the end of ninth grade, credits his edge to pairing physics fundamentals with strong mathematics on complex problems, and describes him as composed and determined. The trip to Colombia was his first long-haul flight; he met competitors from dozens of countries and tried local dishes made from ants. He now plans to focus on English certificates ahead of a future application to study abroad.

The International Physics Olympiad has run since 1967 and is among the most tightly standardised examinations in the world. Every contestant sits the same two five-hour papers — one theoretical, one experimental — translated into their own language by their delegation leaders under sequestration, and marked to a published rubric with an appeals process. Scores are absolute rather than relative, which is why a perfect thirty can be stated as a fact about the paper rather than a ranking against the field. In 2026, eighty-five countries and territories entered.

That structure is what makes the Vietnamese result citable in a way that most national-champion claims are not. Four golds and one silver from a five-person team, with two perfect theory papers, is a distribution that can be compared directly against every previous year and every other delegation. It is also why the comparison to China carries weight: the remark that perfect theory scores are rare even for that team is a statement about a shared, blind-marked examination, not about reputation.