What a surprise reading the Spanish newspaper El Pais this morning (06/09/2022) to find an article about Alexandr Wang a former UNM-PNM Math Contest winner for seven years in a row. In case your Spanish is good enough:
https://elpais.com/gente/2022-06-09/de-como-alexandr-wang-el-ultimo-unicornio-de-silicon-valley-se-ha-convertido-en-el-multimillonario-mas-joven-del-mundo.html
Alexandr Wang started competing in our 2007-08 math contest while on 5th grade and for 7 consecutive years until 2013-14 when he was in 11th grade, not sure if he competed in 12th grade. In 2009-10 he was 3rd overall and from then on he was 1st overall until 10th grade (2012-13) and 5th overall in 2013-14. By then he must have been already thinking about bigger things. In the article it says he started at MIT, after a year he started this company Scale AI as a summer gig and never went back to college, but they are hailing him as the next Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, this link has the story in English:
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/tech-design/article/3179833/next-elon-musk-meet-alexandr-wang-ceo-scale-ai-and
here is a TEDxBerkeley on April 9th, his part starts at 4:22:46 and runs till 4:37:16
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diBoo0pQ8c8
wow!!
Janet and Dimiter Vassilev were in charge of the contest from 2008 until 2016. Before that myself and Mike Nakamaye with Cathy Gosler (now Briand), and before us for many years Liang-shin Hahn who is still a master problem creator and writer of many math problem books including the New Mexico Mathematics Contest Problem Book (University of New Mexico Press, 2005). After that Janet and Daniel Appelo, Janet and Hongnian Huang, Zeb Chaudhry and Hongnian, Zeb and Gleb Zhelezov, and currently Gleb and James Degnan. Here is a link to the math contest webpage: http://mathcontest.unm.edu
Alexandr's older siblings participated and won in the contest too, the family was connected to the contest for at least 10 years (we see this often, sometimes the love for math does run in families).
I hope you are al having a good and productive summer!
cristina
