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Maximus Lu

Mathematician; 2023 IMO Silver Medalist for USA; MIT undergraduate and Putnam Fellow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA · academic
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IMO 2023 Silver Medalist For The USA (Team USA, 2nd Place)2023 Putnam Fellow (top 12 Individual) At MITUSAMO Gold Medal 2022; Two-time USAJMO WinnerAuthored UROP+ Research On Partition Theory (2024)

Maximus Lu is a mathematician who represented the United States at the 64th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2023, Chiba, Japan), earning a Silver Medal and helping Team USA to a second-place finish. He graduated from Syosset High School in New York, where he was a standout competitor (USAMO gold 2022, two-time USAJMO winner, multiple-time AIME qualifier), and went on to study mathematics at MIT, where he has been recognized as a Putnam Fellow.

Maximus Lu is a mathematician and graduate of Syosset High School (New York) who represented the United States at the 64th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2023, Chiba, Japan), taking a Silver Medal (rank 71, 30 points) as Team USA placed second. He is a decorated competitor: USAMO Gold in 2022, two-time USAJMO winner, and a gold medalist at the Romanian Master of Mathematics. He now studies mathematics at MIT, where he was a Putnam Fellow in 2023 and again among the top individual scorers in 2025, and authored an undergraduate research paper, 'Combinatorial Results in Partition Theory,' under the MIT UROP+ program.

Details
LocationCambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Company sitemit.edu
UniversityMassachusetts Institute of Technology
MathematicsCompetitive mathematicsOlympiad problem solvingNumber theoryPartition theoryCombinatorics
Notes
  • Represented the USA at the 64th IMO (2023, Chiba, Japan), winning Silver (rank 71, 30 pts) as Team USA placed 2nd behind China.Jul 2023
  • Named a Putnam Fellow in the 84th Putnam Competition (Dec 2023) as an MIT freshman - top 12 individual, unusual for a first-year and a signal of research-grade ability.Dec 2023
  • Ranked again among the top individual scorers (Next Twelve) in the 86th Putnam (2025), a sustained two-year record at MIT.Dec 2025
  • Authored an undergraduate research paper, 'Combinatorial Results in Partition Theory' (UROP+, mentor Ryota Inagaki, Summer 2024), proving congruences via the double Glaisher map.2024
  • Led an SPUR 2025 geometry project with Aloysius Ng on bounding 2-rich points of line configurations (mentor Jiahui Yu), moving from partition theory into combinatorial geometry.2025
  • Presented 'The uniform boundedness conjecture' at MIT's 18.784 Seminar in Number Theory (Spring 2025).2025
  • Pre-college record: USAMO Gold 2022, USAMO Honorable Mention 2021, USAJMO Winner 2018 & 2020, USAJMO Honorable Mention 2019, AIME qualifier 2016-2022, MOP 2020-2022.
  • Won Gold at the Romanian Master of Mathematics (individual rank #5) with Team USA.
  • The IMO 2023 USA team was reportedly the first recent squad made up entirely of first-time IMO competitors yet finished 2nd; Maximus was part of that cohort.Jul 2023
  • Served as a mentor for MIT PRIMES Circle (high-school outreach), teaching alongside his own research.
  • Graduated Syosset High School (New York) in 2023; local outlets covered his USAMO gold.May 2023
  • No public LinkedIn, X, GitHub, or personal site is findable; his visible footprint is entirely competition and academic-research pages, consistent with a low-profile research student.

Competition record

United States of America · IMO

2023 · Silver · Rank 71