"A number of IMO participants have gone on to become notable mathematicians. The following IMO participants have either received a Fields Medal, an Abel Prize, a Wolf Prize or a Clay Research Award, awards which recognise groundbreaking research in mathematics; a European Mathematical Society Prize, an award which recognizes young researchers; or one of the American Mathematical Society's awards (a Blumenthal Award in Pure Mathematics, Bôcher Memorial Prize in Analysis, Cole Prize in Algebra, Cole Prize in Number Theory, Fulkerson Prize in Discrete Mathematics, Steele Prize in Mathematics, or Veblen Prize in Geometry and Topology) recognizing research in specific mathematical fields. Grigori Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture (one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems), and Yuri Matiyasevich gave a negative solution of Hilbert's tenth problem."

[...]

"IMO medalists have also gone on to become notable computer scientists. The following IMO medalists have received a Nevanlinna Prize, a Knuth Prize, or a Gödel Prize; these awards recognise research in theoretical computer science."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...

A lot of them become Fields medallists. From [1] "The conditional probability that an IMO gold medalist will become a Fields medalist is fifty times larger than the corresponding probability for a PhD graduate from a top 10 mathematics program."

[1]: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20190457

(And with this comment, the 2024 Olympics commences.)

There are so many competitions that don't have any obvious practical significance. And people are still enjoying competitions where AI completely pwns humans.

Also, this is probably a good time to ask whether you won the Putnam... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079