HONG KONG — A Chinese teenage girl has excelled in a mathematics competition, beating not only an AI but also students from prestigious universities such as MIT, Stanford and Princeton.
The swirl of support and shock for the 17-year-old fashion design student stems from her humble educational background: Chinese vocational schools are not known for their academic rigor, and Jiang Ping was the only one of several thousand participants to have come from a vocational school, state media reported.
Jiang placed 12th in the most recent preliminary round of the Alibaba World Mathematics Competition, a notoriously competitive math contest, making her one of 801 finalists from around the world who will face the eight-hour final exam on Saturday.
Qualifying finished last Saturday. The exam took place online over a 48-hour period and included multiple-choice and essay-style questions.
No AI team made it to the finals, organizers said in a post on Chinese social media platform WeChat.
Jiang’s victory with a small minority party has earned him ardent supporters. A hashtag about her had 17 million views as of Saturday, with the Chinese phrase “In a life where others can’t decide for you, anyone can be a dark horse.”
The competition includes questions on applied mathematics, probability and algebra.
A fashion design student from eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, Ms. Jiang’s performance impressed several Chinese universities, who congratulated her on social media.
“Applause for Jiang Ping! People with dreams are amazing!” Zhejiang University, a prestigious university in eastern China, posted on Weibo.
The final results will be announced in August, with the winners receiving a cash prize of up to $30,000.
Tackling Advanced Mathematics “It awakens my inquisitiveness,” she said in an interview posted by the organizers. The interview has been viewed more than four million times, with most viewers surprised by the results and questioning whether it was real.
“People who can appreciate the beauty of math and physics are generally on the next level,” one user wrote. “We need to protect and nurture them.”
In a sign of Jiang Zemin’s rising stardom, fans have been visiting his family home in a village in Jiangsu province on China’s east coast to show their support with gifts of alcohol and money, and photos of Jiang Zemin hang on the walls of a local shopping mall.
Jiang also defeated his own master, Wang Junqiu, who was ranked 125th in the competition.
State media People’s Daily quoted Wang as encouraging her to take part in the contest, saying he wanted to “help young people as much as possible and let them know there is a different future.”
In an interview with organizers, Jiang said that mathematics is his “hobby.” She said she thought she didn’t even qualify to take part in the contest. She now plans to study at a good university, she said.
“If studying fashion design is my Plan A, exploring the world of mathematics is my Plan B,” she said. “I hope that my Plan B gets noticed.”
Although she got a high score The Communist Party secretary of the vocational school she currently attends told state media that she attended the school after scoring high enough in her high school entrance exams, because her sister and a close friend were also students there.
The competition began in 2018 and is open to all math enthusiasts regardless of background, and this year, for the first time, AI teams were allowed to participate.
“Whatever the future holds, this interest will continue,” Jiang said.
Associated Press Contributed.
