Breaking a 17-Year Barrier at the Olympics of Math
In the summer of 2024, in a competition hall in Bath, England, six of the most mathematically gifted young people in the United States sat down to face the 65th International Mathematical Olympiad — a nine-hour examination spread over two days, comprising six problems at the frontier of competition mathematics, each requiring proof that is simultaneously rigorous, elegant, and correct. When the scores were announced, the United States had placed first among all nations. And one member of that team — the only woman — had scored 35 out of 42, placing fifth in the world among 609 competitors from 108 countries. Her name was Jessica Wan.
Jessica Wan was the first woman to represent the United States at the International Mathematical Olympiad since 2007 — a gap of seventeen years that speaks less to any shortage of talented women mathematicians than to the structural barriers and discouraging environments that have historically steered women away from competitive mathematics at the highest level. That Wan did not simply make the team but dominated it — as the highest-scoring American female competitor at IMO 2024 — made the achievement doubly significant.
Her road to Bath had been methodical and remarkable. She is the first and only three-time winner of the Math Prize for Girls, an annual competition that began in 2009 for high school students. That record — never equaled — spoke to consistency across years of competition, not a single brilliant performance. She had also won four consecutive gold medals at the European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad, a feat almost without precedent. Her competitive record was, by the standards of mathematical competition, immaculate.
"Math competitions are not about being the fastest or the cleverest. They're about sitting with a problem long enough that something true reveals itself." — Jessica Wan
Competition mathematics — the kind practiced at the IMO — is a discipline quite distinct from academic mathematics. Where academic math rewards systematic mastery of existing theory, competition math prizes creative problem-solving: the ability to see an unexpected connection, to reformulate a problem in terms that make its solution visible, to construct a proof from scratch under time pressure with no external resources. It is, in many ways, closer to puzzle-solving than to calculation, and it rewards exactly the kind of lateral thinking and combinatorial intuition that defines mathematical talent in the raw.
At MIT, where Jessica Wan enrolled as an undergraduate, her mathematical development has continued along the same trajectory. In late 2024, she won the 2024 Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize — given annually to the highest-scoring woman in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, the most prestigious undergraduate math contest in North America. The Putnam competition is notoriously brutal; a score of ten out of 120 is often enough to place in the top 500 nationally. Wan's score placed her at the top of the women's field across all of North American collegiate mathematics.
"There are so many girls who love math but never see themselves as 'math people.' I want them to see themselves in me." — Jessica Wan
The combined weight of her achievements — IMO gold, four EGMO golds, three Math Prize for Girls victories, Putnam Prize — places Jessica Wan in a tier of mathematical talent that has no comfortable historical parallel among women in American competitive mathematics. She is, by most objective measures, the most decorated American female competition mathematician of her generation. And she is, as of 2025, still an undergraduate.