China's Controversial 17-Year-Old Math Genius Has an Entire Country on Edge

A 17-year-old Chinese student from a rural vocational school who shocked her country by ranking 12th among 802 participants in an elite math contest is now facing accusations of cheating. Math contests are a big deal in China, but it's very rare for such competitions to capture the attention of an entire country like this year's Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition. The unlikely math genius studies fashion design at a rural vocational school in Jiangsu Province, and only studies advanced mathematics as a hobby. A poor girl from rural China with a simple educational background whose exceptional intelligence and passion for mathematics helped her rank 12th among 802 math enthusiasts. On June 18, renowned math competition coach Zhao Bin, who had participated in the Alibaba math contest three times, making it to the finals on all three occasions, posted on WeChat that Jiang Ping's incredible result in this year's contest was 99.99% 'fabricated'. The math coach pointed out several issues with the 17-year-old's solving process, including "The domain of definition was incorrect" and "The differentiation symbol is written in the wrong place," which he claims suggests that she isn't that familiar with math and she just copied the solution. Jian Ping recently participated in the second stage of the global math competition that made her famous, but with results only released in August, the controversy around her performance remains and the whole of China is still on edge.