
Introducing the world’s largest Math Olympiad database
From Marketplace Tech by Marketplace
April 28, 2026 · 8 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the creation of the world's largest Math Olympiad database by a team at MIT.
The International Math Olympiad is a yearly competition for students, most of them high school age, who compete to solve six difficult math problems. They're chosen from a pool of math problems submitted by different countries that participate in the competition. The problems that don't make the cut previously have mostly just been lost; there was no one place you could go to find them. But now a team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has gathered over 30,000 of those problems together in one dataset so both humans and AI models can look through and study them. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Mark Hamilton, a visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL who has been part of the work to gather problems. He’s also a Research Scientist at Google's DeepMind laboratory.
People in this episode
Host: Stephanie Hughes
Guest: Mark Hamilton
Topics covered
- Math Olympiad
- data collection
- AI models
- education
- problem solving
Keywords
- Math Olympiad
- dataset
- MIT
- AI
- math problems
- competition
- research
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Google's DeepMind laboratory
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