A Battery Park City resident and onetime Stuyvesant High School student will be traveling to Kazan, Russia in August to represent the United States at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), a worldwide, annual computer programming competition for high school students. Afterward, Calvin Lee is off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under a program known as “early matriculation.” Calvin attended Stuyvesant from freshman through junior years, at which point he applied to and was accepted by MIT, which rendered his senior year moot. But instead of leaving for MIT immediately, he chose to spend a “gap” year training for IOI, and another competition, the International Math Olympiad.
Calvin’s path to math stardom began in seventh grade, when he was a student at NEST+M, on the Lower East Side, where he qualified for the New York State math competition, as a part of the school’s team. The following year, he went back to the State-wide tournament, this time as the first-place individual from any school in Manhattan. In eighth grade, his ranking in the top four New York State math competitors earned him a spot at the 2012 MATHCOUNTS, a national middle school math competition in Orlando, Florida, where his team placed fourth in the nation. Last year, as a sophomore at Stuyvesant, he competed in the USA Computing Olympiad, where he ranked as a finalist.
The Lee family has lived in Battery Park City for seven years. At a young age, Calvin displayed a precocious interest in Rubik’s Cubes and math-based puzzles. He says that these hobbies came to him naturally, rather than as a result of parental prodding. “I also liked building things,” he recalls.
In middle school, Calvin began taking online classes in computer programming languages, from providers such as the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, the Art of Problem Solving, and Udacity. During the summer before eighth grade, he participated in Google’s highly regarded Computing and Programming Experience (CAPE) summer course, which is now known as the Google Computer Science Summer Institute.
As a freshman at Stuyvesant, he began taking courses normally reserved for seniors. In his sophomore year, Calvin enrolled in the the two most notoriously difficult math classes that Stuyvesant can throw at any student: Multivariate Calculus and Differential Equations. At the same time, he began taking college-level advanced placement courses. He also enrolled in several actual college courses at New York University, at least one of which is normally open only to graduate students. At Stuyvesant, Calvin also qualified for the USA Math Olympiad Summer Program, the USA Physics Olympiad Semifinals and the USA Computing Olympiad. He additionally worked on the Zero Robotics team, a specialized group that focuses on programming robots to work in Earth orbit and deep space. In his junior year, and again in the “gap” year that followed, Calvin was a finalist in the USA Computing Olympiad.
All of these achievements helped to lay the foundation for the computing skills that Calvin is now poised to use in Russia, at the IOI, which consists of two days of programming and algorithmic problem-solving. Students are typically given three problems each day, which they have to solve in five hours. Each student works independently, with only a computer, and isolated from other resources, such as communication with fellow contestants, or text books. But Calvin’s heart is still with the calculus that belies that computation. “The mathematics underneath the code is very familiar to me, and that’s the part I enjoy the most,” he says.
Surprisingly (at least for those, like Plato, who regard mathematicians as “golden souls” endowed with a mysterious talent), Calvin attributes his success more to application than aptitude. “I wasn’t like some child prodigy or anything,” he recalls. “I had to work really hard to get to where I am today.”
Calvin’s favorite place to relax in Battery Park City is the stairs in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, but he may not be seeing much of it in the coming months. Soon after he returns from Russia, Calvin will pack up and move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin his college career as a freshman at MIT. But it was on these steps that he recently mused about on what he hopes to achieve in the years ahead. “The reason why I want to become an entrepreneur,” he said, “is not to make money, but to build the future. It’s amazing, the sheer power of computation that we have today. Everyone likes to say that there is more computational power on your smartphone than what was used to send man to the moon. I want to be able to do something like that, maybe artificial intelligence or machine-learning, to try to make the future a better place.”
Calvin would have liked to delve into more detail about the future that he hopes to help build, but had to cut the conversation short, because he was scheduled to take a practice test in preparation for the IOI.