🇨🇳Shi
Haojia

The International Mathematical Olympiad is not a competition that tolerates imperfection. Six problems. Nine hours spread over two days. The most gifted teenage mathematicians on Earth, drawn from 108 countries. In a typical year, fewer than ten competitors score full marks on even a single problem. A perfect score of 42 — seven points on each problem — is a once-in-a-generation event. Shi Haojia has done it twice, in consecutive years, a feat with no precedent in the 65-year history of the competition.

Shi Haojia was born around 2008 in Zhuji, a city in Zhejiang Province known historically for silk production and, more recently, for producing a disproportionate number of China's academic high achievers. He attended Hailiang High School, part of the Hailiang Group's vast educational enterprise in Zhejiang, a school with a reputation for producing national and international olympiad champions. But even by Hailiang's extraordinary standards, Shi Haojia was something else.

The IMO requires a different kind of intelligence than school mathematics. Problems are designed to resist standard techniques. They demand originality — the ability to look at a configuration in number theory, combinatorics, geometry, or algebra and find a path that nobody has explicitly taught. Preparation involves years of study in olympiad mathematics, a discipline unto itself with its own literature, training camps, and hierarchy of difficulty. China's national olympiad pipeline is among the most developed in the world, a rigorous system of selection and training that produces consistently dominant results. Shi Haojia rose through it faster than almost anyone ever has.

At the 64th IMO in Chiba, Japan in 2023, Shi Haojia was among a small group of students who scored perfectly. China won the team competition that year. The following year, at the 65th IMO in Bath, United Kingdom, something unprecedented happened. While the Chinese team lost the team competition to the United States — a result that generated significant attention in both countries — the individual rankings told a different story. Shi Haojia, now sixteen years old, was the sole competitor to answer all six problems correctly. Six problems. Zero points dropped. In a field of 609 students from 108 countries.

To understand what this means, it helps to know what the problems are like. The IMO Shortlist — from which the actual problems are drawn — contains dozens of candidate problems vetted by mathematical communities worldwide for their depth and originality. Each problem selected for the exam is intended to be solvable by the most talented students, but not easily. Problems in combinatorics may require constructing an argument from scratch. Geometry problems may demand a synthetic insight invisible to coordinate-bashing. Number theory problems often depend on recognizing a modular arithmetic structure that is deeply non-obvious. Shi Haojia, at fifteen and then sixteen, solved every one of them completely.

The mathematical community regards such results with a particular kind of awe. Terence Tao, the Fields Medal winner widely considered the greatest living mathematician, won three IMO medals in the 1980s, including a gold. He scored his perfect score at thirteen — a record for age. Shi Haojia's record is different: not youth, but consistency at the absolute maximum. In the probabilistic terms that mathematicians favor, the probability of answering six IMO problems perfectly once is extremely small. The probability of doing it twice in a row, under different problems, different judges, and a different competitive field, is almost incomprehensibly small without a special explanation — and the explanation, clearly, is Shi Haojia's singular ability.

Little is publicly known about his personal life or what he plans to study next, a reflection of both the relative privacy of Chinese student culture and the youth of the subject himself. What is known is that Zhejiang Province has recognized him, that Chinese mathematical institutions have taken note, and that somewhere in his future is a university mathematics department that will receive one of the most extraordinary students it has ever enrolled.