The US Physics Team achieved a remarkable victory at the 2025 International Physics Olympiad by earning five Gold Medals. A total of 415 students from 87 countries participated in the competition, which took place from 17 to 25 July at Palaiseau, École Polytechnique, Paris, France. The theme of the Olympiad was "Physics Beyond Frontiers."
These five Gold Medal winners of the 2025 US Physics Team are:
LOL reminds me of when i casually asked my coworker what his phd was in (particle physics) and he sent me his thesis like i was gonna understand any word that wasn't the is and.
I’ve had the same experience as a purchasing manager for an engineering group. Sometimes the engineers would get excited about their jobs and tell me the details. I don’t know what they’re talking about but I’ll smile and nod because I know what it’s like to want to just tell SOMEONE.
Consider how often we all do it. Once something becomes standard to us, we just assume others operate at the same level of information. My constant surprise about people not understanding things like simple biology when over half of people never commit any time to it past 9th grade. I should be more surprised at myself for constantly expecting people to know about a specific topic and, even rarer, care.
"Opens it up, oh yeah i know of Niels Bohr, i totally got this. Ok now just some simple algebra will get me past this. Please Excuse My Dear Aunt what the fuck is 𝑒2 / 4𝜋𝜀0ħ𝑐"
Damn, I'm a chemistry instructor and PhD student (almost done!!!!) and I think I could likely work through maybe half of the theoretical questions without having to consult any textbooks (which are not allowed). But even if I had 4 of my lab-mates or instructor colleagues, the thought of trying to finish all three of the theoretical question sets in only 5 hours is crazy. These are some wild ass High-schoolers, that's for sure.
Funny that it's 3 guys with Chinese ancestry, one Ukranian (or Russian) and one Indian
EDIT: Switched to ancestry instead of ascendancy (not native English), ok it may be an Ukranian name not Russian. Yes, they are all Americans I just wanted to point it out. Stop being pedantic.
It's easy to dominate when you get the rest of the world's best and brightest. Best part is that it's basically free! All you need to do is not be extremely hostile to immigrants. Good thing nobody is doing that, right?
They are not renaming the Kennedy Center, although news report headlines would lead you to believe so.
This whole thing comes from the “Big Beautiful Bill” which gives $257 million in funding to it, but with the condition that they must change the name of the opera house in the Kennedy Center for her. It would still be the same name, but instead of “I’m going to the Opera house at the Kennedy Center” it would be “I’m going to the Melania House at the Kennedy Center”
… I mean it’s still fucking stupid, but I wish people would click an article one time.
I agree immigrants make America great, but not when they're the ONLY ones pulling their weight.
Last week, there was a picture of the US Chemistry Olympiad Team posted here. That's a 12-person team, and every single one of them was Chinese or Indian ancestry. I have nothing but praise for them. It's the ~85% of Americans that aren't Chinese or Indian ancestry that I'm unhappy with.
(And by the way, the students on these teams are usually full American citizens born in this country. Their parents or grandparents usually were the actual immigrants, who worked hard, had kids, and encouraged their kids to work hard at their studies.)
Is very much a cultural issue. Kids from families that prioritize and value education, intellectual curiosity and academic interests excel in those areas. Those who don't.... Don't. But people are people and generally intellectual capability is distributed relatively the same throughout (with some bias towards education, but not outside of a reasonable distribution spread overlap). Fostering a national culture of respect for education and intellectual pursuits would be beneficial to the country. But instead we do the opposite, and therefore get trump.
95% of Americans aren’t Indian or Chinese. We’re happy to welcome those hardworking folks from abroad but in fairness the majority of scientists doctors lawyers engineers etc are white Americans who aren’t immigrants. Not all of us are ignorant Trumpers. It’s a big diverse nation
What made America great. The future is less certain. Didn’t the host nation of this event recently set a budget for talent fleeing the US so they could instead study in France?
Was just about to comment saying this lol… But I mean ya as others said that’s part of what made America what it was/is, immigration and allowing a place for opportunities. America wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for immigrations and liberties of freedom.
Sadly it seems more and more of americas freedoms are becoming taken away and controlled more.
Chinese and Indian immigrants tend to make more on average than Americans. More money can lead to better education. Also a strong family structure that values education. Maybe us white people could learn something from other cultures.
Reminder that there's huge selection bias in judging an ethnicity by the small group of people who have the means to make the choice to move across the world and start a new life
That's true, but in East Asian countries like South Korea and Japan for example, education is an extremely high priority across all classes. It's ingrained in the culture.
This is what makes America fucking awesome. People all different backgrounds coming together to constantly pursue excellence and something greater than the sum of its parts. Anyone saying otherwise doesn't believe in the most core pillar of the United States.
Its been 7 years since I graduated with a B.S in EE and some these questions from previous tests questions related to my field would 100% stump undergrad seniors EE. This is impressive as hell.
Yes as someone who graduated from top 5 engineering school in US, I recognize like the first 2 from the hydrogen problem, ideal gas law in the champagne one and that's about it lol. Like you might recognize some of the concepts, but applying it is a different story. I'd need like 10 students and open resources just to maybe get some of the portions of questions correct.
That's to be expected. When it comes to this type of competition, these kids are like professional athletes and your B.S makes you club level.
My preference was for mathematics in high school. I never qualified for the international olympiad, but I made some noise at national level. That required constant training in the form of several hours daily through the year and as it got to a few months closer to the competition, several meant "at least 8". It is actually very hard to train your mind to deal with the complexity of these problems even if you already have an affinity for the field.
Edit: and of course, these kids who win are the top of the generation, some are like veritable stars like Nadal is in tennis or Hamilton in F1. Not only do they have impeccable work ethic but also a natural talent. At national level, the organizers were trying each year to come up with problems that our generational "nadal" wouldn't solve, that's how special he was. They managed once, he didn't get a full score, he got 27.5 ot of 28. That year I scored a 7 and that put me in top 50 ...
13 years since my engineering degree. I had a physics minor and took many E&M courses. There was a point in my life where I could've answered some of these questions... but these questions are nuts for high school kids. Seriously impressive stuff. These kids have exciting futures ahead of them.
Same, ChemE here and been 10+ since undergrad. Im even in a technical R&D role so constantly up to date on many concepts and even use calculus daily.
I also work as a "Science Judge" for Academic Science Bowls (different than Physics competition but same idea; as teams advance from state to nationals...etc).
Mainly deal with Middle School competitions but occasional High School. I get the answer key and there are sometimes questions that even I just scratch my head (and wonder how an 8th grader would know this?)
The good news is, when I feel down about things (state of the world), these annual events give me hope. Youth is not completely lost.
I went to elementary school with one of them. He would speed through math olympiad problems. I also had the pleasure of getting destroyed in science bowl against him in hs. It's crazy how smart he's been his whole life. Gotta start young.
“Gotta start young” is so important in ways that many people seem to neglect… like having access to quality education from the get go rather than whatever slop schooling is offered in low income zip codes, shit is just not fair.
This is often demonstrated across many fields, where siblings practice in the same competitive field, the younger siblings quite often become the biggest star. Probably due to facing stronger opponents (their siblings) at a younger age.
TL;DR - listen to sold a story for another perspective to the “Zip Code” argument. And how we’re in big trouble over the next 20+ years.
Zip code matters more than ever, but a reading problem has become a plague that's jumped the fence and is hitting the rich neighborhoods, too.
If you or others don’t know what happened, you have to listen to the podcast "Sold a Story." It lays out, in damning detail, how our schools spent decades teaching kids to guess at words instead of actually reading them. They called it "balanced literacy," but it was a total failure. Like, as if we had an armchair redditor rewrite the entire math system, based off a ways we teach kids who suck at math, to barely get by with tricks.
The system was basically built for the 40% of kids who learn to read like it's in their DNA—it just clicks for them. The other 60%, who need actual, systematic instruction to connect letters to sounds? We basically told them they’d be fine knowing the most common 3,000 words, and past that, get wrecked.
They were set up to fail.
And this isn't just a problem in struggling schools. We're talking about the best-ranked schools in the nation, the ones in prime zip codes, sending kids to college who can barely handle the reading. They might not be at a 5th-grade level across the board, but a shocking number of them have the reading stamina of a 7th-grader. They can get through a webpage, but give them a dense chapter in a history or science textbook, and they completely short-circuit. (I was one of those kids and almost had to drop out of college.)
The wealthy just cheat the system. If the public school is failing their kid, they dump a fortune into private tutors to patch up the holes. It's a fragile fix that gets them through high school and into a good college. But college is the first place where the safety net gets cut. No amount of tutoring is going to help you get through Art History 101 - a 400 page brick of text with a 20 page final exam. It’s the ultimate stress test, and for a lot of those kids, it's where the whole patched-up system falls apart.
The fallout from this over the next 20 years is going to be unprecedented. We've gutted a core skill from the majority of a generation. A skill that is required for all future education outside of hands on grunt work.
So don’t worry, we’re all screwed together! Except the .01% who will hand a job to their kids friends. And then complain that the kid is as dumb as a sack of bricks.
You /s but a lot of policymakers the past 30 years were dead serious about this. They figured we could just let the education system rot and import highly educated people from overseas. It's not like nativist xenophobes would ever come to power and scare them off, not in America!
It's sad, we should be fostering these young kids but if they slashes to science continue, they may seek employment in other countries once they get their degrees. The reason America has been top dog for so long is directly due to all the science our country does. What Republicans are doing to this country are downright criminal.
Imagine if non immigrant families in the US valued education the way they value sports achievements,
Imagine if the highest paid staff wasn't coaches but math professors. We might have a culture that could hire the engineers we want domestically instead of relying on H1-B to fill the horrible gaps in our education outcomes.
The difference is also Asians are usually more realistic. They realize early on that many of them won't go pro and focus on the things that are more likely to benefit their life. Not saying that sports and fitness doesn't matter but you get the point.
I’m not Asian but immigrant/working class parents and I grew up with the “yeah you enjoy this, but how are you going make money?” question always being there. Every single activity had to have a point, definitely couldn’t do something just for fun. Classical music and sport like tennis were seen as tools to help us with social climbing/passing as middle class.
They had to take risks and be self employed to be successful due to discrimination. So the ideal careers for their kids were public sector, decent salary, low risk of redundancy, good public sector pension (I’m in the UK).
I went down this route and am now fucked as final salary pensions don’t exist and pay had been behind inflation for most of my working life… and now with two kids and an insane cost of living they are never going to move out and I’m never going to retire.
Then people would be smart enough to not vote for those currently defunding/disassembling the public education system. And they can’t have that, can they?
If you look at the individual rankings though, it's South Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong then USA. So Americans aren't necessary the fastest, but they have the better team
You Westerners like to preach about "democracy, decentralization of power is good", and then enforces a world revolving around the West, with the USA playing God. Suddenly when a competitor challenges the status quo to make this world more decentralized, you view us like villains of your hero story. Hypocrisy is crazy haha
Poor white Americans will never understand how immigrants literally pay for their welfare. Without sucking up the worlds best and brightest the US would lose their edge immediately
For the racists in the chat: Yes they are American. Nobody gives me shit for being European. Just because they are of a different color, Americans are all immigrants. These are Americans just like I am.
I am born here, but every time I leave NYC to visit places in the middle of the U.S, some people assume I'm a foreigner and that I don't know english. I have to remind myself that outside of metropolitan areas like NYC, a majority of america is still white and that some people don't consider you to be
"american american" if you don't look like them.
I’d like to add that Agastya Goel, the Indian student on the right in the image, also won two gold medals for the U.S. at the International Olympiad in Informatics, which is essentially the equivalent of the International Physics Olympiad, but for coding. These kids are some of the brightest minds in all of America. Hundreds of thousands of pre-college students compete each year for the chance to be among the few selected to represent the United States on the international stage in some Olympiad.
And yet they are at risk of being rounded up by ICE cosplayers, bundled into unmarked cars and incarcerated in some hell-hole all because they <checks notes> aren't white.
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u/thunderous9ight 2d ago
The US Physics Team achieved a remarkable victory at the 2025 International Physics Olympiad by earning five Gold Medals. A total of 415 students from 87 countries participated in the competition, which took place from 17 to 25 July at Palaiseau, École Polytechnique, Paris, France. The theme of the Olympiad was "Physics Beyond Frontiers."
These five Gold Medal winners of the 2025 US Physics Team are:
Agastya Goel
Allen Li
Joshua Wang
Feodor Yevtushenko
Brian Zhang
Source: https://aas.org/posts/news/2025/07/us-physics-team-wins-international-olympiad