Since 1959 the world’s top teenage mathematicians (and, more recently, those of great ability in other fields) have tested their mettle in international competitions called Olympiads. Around 300 medals of gold, silver and bronze are awarded for maths annually. A smaller number are given for physics, chemistry and informatics (ie, computing). From the ranks of the winners has emerged an elite unlike any in the history of capitalism. Behold: Olympiad Man.
In Plato’s “Republic”, society comprises men of gold, who are fit to rule, men of silver, destined to be soldiers, and those of bronze, who become farmers.
Davos Man cut his teeth at McKinsey in his 20s, but Olympiad Man was acing maths competitions before his first drink. (Olympiad Woman is far rarer.) Very clever children often become very, very expensive adults. He recently decamped to OpenAI, whose head researcher has moonlighted as head coach of America’s informatics team. Like their sporting namesakes, Olympiad victories are a worthy source of national pride. But the business of rearing and attracting Olympiad Men is also a source of national power and wealth. That was true when they mostly stayed in universities. It is doubly so now that many work for a living. They move in herds. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one magnet. Trinity College, Cambridge is another. Both institutions are islands of excellence in towns obsessed with equality. Google employs the most. Meta is a distant second. As well as Jane Street, Jump Trading is a popular employer in finance. Olympiad Man’s vision of globalisation is more attractive than Davos Man’s. The West, and America in particular, is an enthusiastic importer of Olympiad talent, which might start life in Romania, China or India. Studying Olympiad Man is also a corrective to bad views on immigration. Does the left not wonder whether they should spend more time attracting Olympians rather than delivery drivers? Does the right not see the outstanding achievements of immigrants in its national teams? To look only at their names, and not their star-spangled ties, it would be easy to mistake America’s maths team for the Chinese one.
In 2024 Google paid $2.7bn to hire Noam Shazeer, who achieved a perfect maths score in 1994. In the 2010s Sheryl Sandberg, the archetypal Davos Woman, was Meta’s best-paid executive; now it is probably Alexandr Wang, aged 29 and not long off America’s problem-set circuit. AI startups counting Olympiad Men among their founders include Databricks (worth $190bn), Cursor ($60bn), Cognition ($48bn) and Perplexity ($30bn). Deedy Das, an investor at Menlo Ventures, examined the maths, informatics and physics competitors of the past 25 years.
A Turkish economist, more than half of those who participated in Olympiads in the 2000s ended up living abroad, according to Tolga Yuret.
