Reid W. Barton
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Reid W. Barton is currently a graduate student at Harvard University in mathematics, and one of the all-time greatest performers in the International science olympiads.
Barton was the first student to ever win four gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, culminating in full-marks at the 2001 Olympiad held in Washington, D.C., shared only with fellow American Gabriel Carroll and Chinese teammates Xiao Liang and Zhang Zhiqiang. Barton has earned a place among the five top ranked competitors (who are themselves not ranked against each other) in the William Lowell Putnam Competition four times (2001–2004), a feat matched by five others (Don Coppersmith (1968–71), Arthur Rubin (1970–73), Bjorn M. Poonen (1985–88), Ravi D. Vakil (1988–91), Gabriel D. Carroll (2000–03)), being on the MIT team for the duration, earning the school a second place finish 2001, and two first placements (2003, 2004). He has won the Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student awarded jointly by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America for his work on packing densities.
Barton has also performed well in programming. He has earned two gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, earning a first place finish in 2001 by the largest gap between first and second place in the history of the IOI, with 580 points out of 600, 55 ahead of his nearest competitor. He has been on the 2nd and 5th place MIT team at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and reached the finals in the TopCoder Open (2004) and the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge (2004).
He is the son of two environmental engineers. His abilities were evident from an early age, being tutored in game theory by a mathematics graduate student in grade three, and obtaining the maximum score of 5 on the AP Calculus examination while 10 years old. Officially homeschooled since third grade, Barton took part time classes at Tufts University, in chemistry (5th grade), physics (6th grade), and subsequently Swedish, Finnish, French, and Chinese. Working part-time with MIT computer scientist Charles E. Leiserson since eighth grade, he honed his abilities on CilkChess, one of the top computer chess programs at the time.
Barton has a degree of skill in music, playing the piano and the cello with proficiency. He has taught for many summers at various academic olympiad training programs, such as the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program, teaching high schoolers the ropes (a collection of his notes is available).
[edit] Trivia
According to Richard Stanley, the first time Barton participated in Putnam Competition was in 2000 when he was still a high-school senior. Stanley himself graded the solutions and says that Barton solved correctly every single problem. Of course, these results remain unofficial — otherwise Barton would be a five time Putnam winner (if this were allowed—notably fellow high school senior Gabriel Carroll submitted an official top-five entry on the same exam in 2000 and used up one of his four chances to go head-to-head with Reid in college).
