It’s a victory by the United States that’s being compared to “The Miracle On Ice”.
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After defeating rivals from more than 100 countries at the worldwide Mathematical Olympiad a group of top American math students has won the worldwide Mathematical Olympiad after 21 years which was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to bring home the first US win since 1994, NPR reports.
But that narrative recently took a turn: The US team won the worldwide Math Olympiad this week for the first time since 1994.
Ryan Alweiss, Allen Liu, Yang Liu, Shyam Narayanan, and David Stoner of the USA team were all awarded gold medals, while Michael Kural earned a silver medal, just missing gold by a single point.
“This is a huge deal”.
“This is a matter of national pride”, Po-Shen Loh, the U.S.’ head coach, told The Washington Post. Final scores are determined based on points accumulated by individual team members who are given six problems in sets of three to solve in 4.5 hour sessions over two days. China has captured the title 19 times since the competition began in 1959. South Korea clinched third place. China, which topped all other countries in the most recent administration of a global assessment known as PISA, took second place in the math contest.
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“[A competition like the olympiad] plays the same role as the Olympics does in sports: to have some sort of far destination that all of our hundreds of thousands or millions of people in America can reach towards, like a pinnacle in the distance”, Loh said.
