Reid Barton

Background

Barton is the son of two environmental engineers.

Education

Harvard University.

Career

Officially homeschooled since third grade, Barton took part-time classes at Tufts University, in chemistry (5th grade), physics (6th grade), and subsequently Swedish, Finnish, French, and Chinese. Since eighth grade he worked part-time with Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist Charles East. Leiserson on CilkChess, a computer chess program Subsequently, he worked at Akamai Technologies with computer scientist Ramesh Sitaraman to build one of the earliest video performance measurement systems that have since become a standard in industry.

After Akamai, Barton went to graduate school at Harvard to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics

Barton has been placed among the five top ranked competitors (who are themselves not ranked against each other) in the William Lowell Putnam Competition four times (2001–2004), a performance matched by seven others (Don Coppersmith (1968-1971), Arthur Rubin (1970-1973), Bjorn Poonen (1985-1988), Ravi Doctorate. Vakil (1988-1991), Gabriel Doctorate. Carroll (2000-2003), Daniel Kane (2003-2006), Brian R. Lawrence (2007-2008, 2010-2011)). In 2001 he finished first with 580 points out of 600, 55 ahead of his nearest competitor, the largest margin in IOI history at the time.

Barton has taught at various academic olympiad training programs for high schoolers, such as the Mathematical Olympiad Summer Program.

Achievements

• Barton was the first student to win four gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, culminating in full marks at the 2001 Olympiad held in Washington, District of Columbia, shared with Gabriel Carroll, Xiao Liang and Zhang Zhiqiang. Barton has won two gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics. Barton has won the Morgan Prize awarded jointly by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America for his work on packing densities.

Membership

Barton was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team which finished second in 2001 and first in 2003 and 2004. Barton was a member of the 2nd and 5th place Massachusetts Institute of Technology team at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest, and reached the finals in the TopCoder Open (2004), semi-finals (2003, 2006), the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge (2004), semi-finals (2006), TCCC Regional finals (2002), and TopCoder Invitational semi-finalist (2002).