math-olympiad
(6)
Arvid Lunnemark and the Beautiful Problem of Knowing What Comes Next
Before Cursor learned to predict a programmer’s next move, its Swedish co-founder learned to prize a rarer skill: knowing which problems are worth solving at all.
The Public-Speaking School That Began With One Father’s Expensive Problem
Jackson Chow went looking for an affordable debate class for his seventh-grader. The search ended with a camp of his own - and a durable lesson in how small classes, repeated practice and civic partners can turn confidence into a teachable product.
Po-Shen Loh on Education, Opportunity, and Humanity After AI
Mathematician Po-Shen Loh, the longtime U.S. International Math Olympiad coach, argues that AI is about to erase the promise of a 'stable life' and that the way humanity thrives afterward is by building high-trust networks of curious, caring people. Drawing on visits to a high-poverty fourth-grade classroom in rural South Carolina and to Africa, he describes vast untapped pools of authentic talent, a coaching pipeline where students mentor younger students across borders, and a new 'economic flow system' powered by trust and remote work. He warns about the risks of an interconnected, AI-written, robot-run world, and reframes education around intention, curiosity, and the ability to solve non-standard problems. A brief closing segment features a Stanford instructor describing the rise of the 'AI-native engineer.'
Po-Shen Loh
Carnegie Mellon math professor and former U.S. Math Olympiad coach Po-Shen Loh argues that as AI surpasses humans at logic and language, the most important skill young people can develop is autonomous thinking. He warns that using AI to do school writing is 'like driving a car one mile for exercise,' explains why AI now solves original Olympiad problems he couldn't, and lays out a win-win-win education ecosystem that pairs middle schoolers, high-school math talent, and Broadway-caliber acting coaches to teach kids how to generate their own ideas, empathize, and think critically in an age of biased information.
Jasper Zhang
Jasper Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbolic, an open-access AI cloud and GPU marketplace based in San Francisco. A math prodigy who won gold medals at the Chinese and Russian Mathematical Olympiads and finished a UC Berkeley math PhD in two years, he moved from quantitative research at Citadel Securities to blockchain research at Ava Labs before founding Hyperbolic in 2022 with Yuchen Jin. His mission: make large-scale AI compute affordable and available to anyone with an idea, from students to enterprises.
Sualeh Asif
Sualeh Asif is the 26-year-old co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor - the AI-powered code editor that reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue faster than any B2B company in history. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, he represented his country at the International Mathematical Olympiad three times before studying at MIT, where he and three classmates built the product that is now rewriting how software gets made. Valued at $1.3 billion on Forbes' 2026 Billionaires List, Asif went from teaching math to Karachi students to co-architecting the tool powering 50,000+ enterprises including Nvidia, Adobe, and Uber.