Name Gennady Korotkevich Years active 2005– | ||
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Other names "Tourist" (handle); Gena (diminutive) Known for Programming prodigy; highly ranked sport programmer since a very young age | ||
Residence Saint Petersburg, Russia Similar Petr Mitrichev, Anatoly Shalyto, Adam D'Angelo | ||
Day Zero: Tips and Tricks from Gennady Korotkevich
Gennady Korotkevich (Belarusian: Генадзь Караткевіч, Hienadź Karatkievič, Russian: Геннадий Короткевич; born 25 September 1994), is a Belarusian sport programmer who has won major international competitions since age 11, as well as numerous national competitions. His top accomplishments include six consecutive gold medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics as well as the world championship in the 2013 and 2015 International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals. As of July 2016, Korotkevich is currently the highest-rated programmer at Codeforces, and the second highest rated algorithm competitor at TopCoder..
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Biography
Korotkevich was born in Gomel (Homiel), southeastern Belarus. His parents, Vladimir and Lyudmila Korotkevich, are programmers in the mathematics department at Francysk Skaryna Homiel State University. At age 6, he became interested in his parent's work. When he was 8, his father designed a children's game he could use to learn programming.
His mother consulted departmental colleague Mikhail Dolinsky, who gave the boy a small book to read. Dolinsky, one of the top computer science teachers in Belarus, recalled, "A month went by, and then another one ... No news from Gena. Then suddenly Lyudmila comes by and brings me a programming notebook: when summer and football were over, her son sat at the computer. As a second grader at a national competition, he took second place, which gained him automatic entry in a technical university without taking any entrance exams. Somehow he solved the problem of a body immersed in water. At that time, Gena didn't even know about Archimedes' principle of buoyancy."
Korotkevich first grabbed global attention when he qualified for the 2006 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) at the age of 11, which itself is a world record by a large margin.
He took the silver medal at his first IOI event, and received gold medals 2007 to 2012. To date he is the most successful competitor in IOI's history.
At the 2009 IOI in Plovdiv, the then 14-year-old Korotkevich said of his success, "I try various [strategies], and one of them is the right one. I am no genius. I am simply good at it." He said he spent no more than three to four hours each day at the computer, and his preferred hobbies are football and table tennis.
In the fall of 2012, he moved to Russia to attend ITMO University. In the summer of 2013, he helped ITMO defeat Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Tokyo to win the 37th International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, held in Saint Petersburg. He also won the Google Code Jam in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.
In a 2014 interview, Korotkevich said he was unsure of his career plans after graduation. "What happens next is yet to be decided," he said. "I don't have any concrete or long-term plans. I've only finished my sophomore year at university. For me it's important to get an education first and then decide about working. Maybe I'll go into science. But again, I really have not decided yet."