17-year-old fashion student beats prestigious college rivals and AI teams in Alibaba math competition

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A 17-year-old fashion design student has garnered widespread attention in China for making it to the final of an Alibaba-backed global math competition, with her background of studying at a Jiangsu-based vocational senior secondary school marking her out against the other finalists who hailed from prestigious schools such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, and MIT. Ranked 12th out of a total of 801 finalists, Jiang Ping was also the only female in the top 30, according to Alibaba. Jiang spent two years self-studying partial differential equations, according to a video posted by the competition organizer, Alibaba’s DAMO Academy. She said she wanted to show what she could do and “be seen by others.” The annual competition allowed teams to use artificial intelligence to solve the math problems this year, but none of the teams who employed AI were successful in making it to the final. [DAMO Academy, in Chinese]