Meet Indian genius, son of IIT-JEE topper, who won gold at world’s toughest...

Indian-Origin teen wins second gold medal at International Programming Olympiad: Agastya Goel who is a teenager of Indian origin and the son of Stanford professor Ashish Goel, has won his second gold medal at the prestigious International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). The IOI is considered the world’s toughest programming competition for high school students. Agastya secured the fourth overall rank at the recently-concluded 36th edition of the event, held in Egypt.

In this year’s competition, Agastya scored 438.97 out of 600 points. The first-place winner, Kangyang Zhou from China, achieved a perfect score of 600 out of 600. A total of 34 students won gold medals at the Olympiad, including another Indian, Kshitij Sodani, who ranked 21st.

For Agastya, this victory marks his second gold medal at the IOI. His outstanding performance has been celebrated widely, with many people taking to social media to praise him. One X (formerly Twitter) user compared Agastya’s success to that of his father, Ashish Goel, who topped the IIT-JEE exam in 1990 and has had a remarkable career, working with companies like Twitter and Stripe.

“Agastya Goel just won his second IOI gold medal for the US in the toughest programming contest for high school students. He was ranked #4 overall. His father, Ashish Goel, was #1 out of nearly 1 million students in the IIT-JEE exam in 1990 in India and is now a professor at Stanford! Like father, like son,” the post read.

About the International Olympiad in Informatics

The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is an annual programming competition, recognized as one of the five major International Science Olympiads. It was launched in 1989 by UNESCO. Over two days, participants face challenging problems that test their skills in computer programming, coding, and solving algorithm-based problems.

Who is Ashish Goel?

Ashish Goel, Agastya’s father, is a professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Originally from Uttar Pradesh, India, he completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1994 before moving to the United States to earn his PhD at Stanford. Ashish Goel’s research spans a wide range of areas in computer science, such as algorithmic game theory, computational social science, and computer networks. He was also involved with Twitter in its early stages and contributed to designing its monetization model.

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