The 1980 Math Olympiad Program: Where are they now? | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Brian Hunt: He was the #1 math team kid in our team (Montgomery County, Maryland). I think he came in first place in the international olympiad the next year (yup, here’s the announcement). We carpooled once or twice to county math team practices, and I remember that his mom would floor it rather than slow down when she came to a yellow light. I looked Brian up, and he is now a math professor at the University of Maryland. On Google scholar, his most cited paper is “Efficient data assimilation for spatiotemporal chaos: A local ensemble transform Kalman filter.” Benji Fisher: He was quite a character, larger than life in some ways. He came in first place in the regional math competition (this required getting 8 problems out of 8 correct, which was difficult; maybe I got 4 correct that year, or maybe only 2?). I remember him (perhaps incorrectly) as a big guy with long hair in a ponytail. When I came to Columbia in 1996, I noticed that he was teaching in the math department. I gave him a