From Olympiad Gold to President: The Nicușor Dan Story

At the 1988 International Mathematical Olympiad in Canberra, a Romanian teenager named Nicușor Dan sat down to six problems over two days and solved every one of them, for a perfect score of 42 out of 42. He was one of only five contestants on the planet to do so that year. Another of the five was Ngô Bảo Châu of Vietnam, who would go on to win the Fields Medal in 2010, the highest honor in mathematics. And for Dan it was not even the first time: he had scored a perfect 42 the year before, in Havana, too.

Thirty-seven years later, in May 2025, the same man was elected President of Romania. This is the story of that path — not the politics, which belong to Romanians and their ballots, but the thing that came before it: what a rigorous mathematical training actually is, what it demands of a person, and which parts of it quietly transfer to problems that have nothing to do with numbers.

The International Mathematical Olympiad, first held in 1959, is the oldest and most prestigious mathematics competition for pre-university students. Each country sends a team of up to six. Over two consecutive days the contestants face six problems — three per day — drawn from algebra, geometry, number theory, and combinatorics. Each problem is marked out of seven points, so the perfect paper is worth one very specific number:

A gold medal typically goes to roughly the top one-twelfth of contestants. A score of 42 out of 42 means something far stronger: you did not drop a single point across all six problems, and no one in the world beat you. Dan did exactly that twice. At the 1987 Olympiad in Havana he took gold with a perfect 42, one of nineteen contestants who reached the maximum that year. At the 1988 Olympiad in Canberra he did it again — 42 out of 42, tied for first place in the world — and this time the perfect score was far rarer.

Nicușor Dan was born on 20 December 1969 in Făgăraș, a small town in Transylvania at the foot of the Carpathian mountains. Romania in that era ran one of the most serious mathematical-olympiad pipelines in the world — a national ladder of school, county, and country-level rounds that funneled the strongest students toward the international team. Both of Dan's perfect Olympiad papers came out of that system, while he was still a high-school student.

After the Olympiads he enrolled at the University of Bucharest to study mathematics. A student arriving there with two perfect IMO scores was, by any measure, among the very best young mathematicians the country had produced. The natural next step for someone on that trajectory was not a job but deeper study, and for the strongest Romanian students of the period that increasingly meant France.

Dan continued his studies in Paris. He completed a master's degree at the École Normale Supérieure — the storied institution that has trained a large share of France's mathematicians and scientists — and then went on to a doctorate. In 1998 he defended a PhD in mathematics at Université Paris 13, with a thesis titled "Courants de Green et prolongement méromorphe": Green currents and meromorphic continuation, squarely in the world of complex geometry and analysis.

A mathematics doctorate is a particular kind of training, and it is worth pausing on what it involves. You spend years on a single hard problem whose answer nobody knows in advance — including, often, whether the thing you are trying to prove is even true. There is no answer key. A proof either holds, with every step following from the last, or it does not, and no amount of confidence or authority can patch a gap in the argument. That is a very specific way of relating to a problem, and it is not one most careers ever ask for.

Dan returned to Romania and, in the early 2000s, helped found the Școala Normală Superioară București, a mathematics research and teaching center modeled on the French école that had trained him. It was an attempt to build at home the kind of institution he had benefited from abroad, so that the next generation of strong Romanian students would not have to leave to be trained well.

His move into public life did not begin with an election. In 2006 he founded a civic association called Salvați Bucureștiul — "Save Bucharest" — that challenged illegal real-estate construction in the capital through the courts. This was, in a sense, applied logic: read the rules, check whether a given permit actually satisfied them, and, where it did not, say so precisely and prove it in front of a judge. Years of that work made him a known quantity in the city long before his name appeared on a ballot.

The lawsuits eventually pushed Dan from the courtroom into elected office. In 2016 he co-founded a political party, the Save Romania Union (USR), and won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, where he served from 2016 to 2020.

In 2020 he was elected Mayor of Bucharest, running as an independent and taking 42.81 percent of the vote. In 2024 the city re-elected him, this time with 47.94 percent. Across those years the shape of the work stayed recognizable: budgets, permits, contracts, and disputes, all of which reward the same habit as a construction lawsuit — taking a messy situation, stating it precisely, and checking whether the numbers and the rules actually line up.

In 2025 Dan ran for President of Romania as an independent candidate. Romanian presidential elections use a two-round system: if no one wins an outright majority in the first round, the top two candidates advance to a runoff two weeks later.

In the first round Dan placed second with 20.99 percent of the vote, behind George Simion, who led with 40.96 percent. In the runoff, held on 18 May 2025, the order reversed. Dan won with roughly 53.6 percent to 46.4 percent, on a turnout of about 65 percent, and became the seventh President of Romania since the country's return to democratic elections. He took office as an independent. The teenager who had not dropped a point in Canberra was, thirty-seven years later, a head of state.

It would be a mistake to claim that solving Olympiad geometry is the same skill as running a country; it plainly is not. Governing draws on things mathematics never teaches — coalition-building, persuasion, empathy, the management of people who disagree. But a serious mathematical training does leave a person with a specific and portable set of habits, and it is worth naming them precisely rather than mythologizing them.

The first is the discipline of proof. In mathematics a claim is not true because an authority asserts it, or because it is popular, or because you would like it to be; it is true only when every step follows from what came before. The habit of refusing to accept a conclusion until the argument for it actually closes is the same one behind checking whether a permit really satisfies the law, or whether a budget line really adds up.

The second is comfort with hard, slow problems. An Olympiad problem cannot be brute-forced or looked up, and a doctoral thesis is years of not knowing whether your target is even reachable. Both train a tolerance for sitting with a difficult, unresolved problem without flinching toward the easy, wrong answer just to be done with it.

The third is evidence-first reasoning: starting from the data and the definitions rather than from the conclusion you wish were true, and being willing to follow the argument all the way to an uncomfortable place. None of this guarantees good judgment — mathematicians can be as wrong about the world as anyone else. But the underlying move, taking a tangled situation, stating it exactly, and reasoning through it step by verifiable step, is precisely what the training builds, and it does not stay behind in the classroom.

The whole arc, from a small town in Transylvania to the presidency, fits on a single line:

What did Nicușor Dan study? Mathematics, all the way through. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Bucharest, a master's at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and a PhD at Université Paris 13, defended in 1998, in the area of complex geometry and analysis.

How rare is a perfect IMO score? Very. A gold medal already puts you in roughly the top one-twelfth of contestants, and a perfect 42 out of 42 means beating every problem with no points dropped. In some years a couple of dozen students manage it; in 1988, only five did worldwide. Dan scored a perfect 42 in both 1987 and 1988.

Is competition or research mathematics useful outside academia? The specific theorems usually are not — but the training is. What you carry out of it is a way of working: define the problem precisely, distrust unproven claims, and stay with a hard question long enough to actually resolve it. Those habits travel into law, engineering, finance, science, and public administration.

What transfers from math training to public problem-solving? Three things above all: the discipline of proof (a conclusion is only as good as the argument that closes it), tolerance for hard and slow problems, and evidence-first reasoning that starts from the facts rather than the desired answer. They are not a substitute for judgment, experience, or ethics — but they are a genuine foundation.