To Be the Best Among the Best

Aleksandr Morozov, the first-year student of HSE Saint Petersburg, won the gold as a part of the Russian team on the International Competition in Informatics IOI 2019.

The competition among the strongest programmers of the planet had been taking a place from 4th to 11th of August in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and it gathered 331 students from 88 countries. Russian team on the contest was represented by two first-year students from NRU HSE – Alexandr Morozov (graduate of Saint Petersburg Presidential physical and mathematical lyceum №239 and the first-year student of HSE Saint Petersburg School of Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, programme “Applied Mathematics and Information Science”), Vladimir Romanov (graduate of MSU Specialized educational and scientific centre and the first-year student of Faculty of Computer Science of HSE Moscow campus), Ildar Gainullin (11th grade student of Lyceum named after N.I. Lobachevskiy at Kazan Federal University) and Egor Lifar (10th grade student of “Intellectual” Moscow School”). Russian team became an absolute leader in the team competition.

As Aleksandr Morozov says, his personal way to the victory began from a programming club where his mother led him in the 5th grade.

In the club classes, I learned the basics and gradually improved my skills. Accumulated knowledge let me participate in the All-Russian Schoolchildren Olympiad and other contests. The results of the federal level allowed me to be included in the top-20 best programmers of Russia. I was invited to special meetings after which three people and I were included in the national team.

Two of my teammates had already participated in the IOI contest last year, so this year they performed better. For me the contest of such level and scale was the first, however, I had been a participant of international contests in Romania, Bulgaria, and Kazakhstan.