The person behind the medals

Aanya Goyal is a sixth-former at Alleyn's School, Dulwich, and one of the most decorated student competitors the UK has produced: fifteen international olympiad selections across mathematics, computing and linguistics, with national-team recognition in astrophysics besides. She holds the joint world record for five medal-scoring appearances at the European Girls' Mathematical Olympiad, and is the only British female to win multiple medals at the Romanian Masters of Mathematics — regarded as the hardest mathematics competition on the calendar.

Academically, she pairs that competition record with A*A*A* at A-level in Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Physics, Grade S ("Outstanding") in STEP II and III, and 12 GCSEs averaging 8.41 out of 9. She holds an Academic Scholarship at Alleyn's, with comparable offers from three other London schools.

What she does between competitions

By her own account in the press, Aanya unwinds with crosswords and Kakuro puzzles, and plays "Chak De India" and "Ziddi Dil" — two Bollywood anthems — before she competes. She grew up between two cricket clubs, has a Gold LAMDA award in Drama, and once led a school film project on racism.

A decade of qualification, in brief

• First entered national competition at age 11 — a Gold Medal in the JMO, awarded to the top 0.01%.
• Placed joint-first on Leaderboard A in two separate national cipher-decoding challenges (2020 & 2021), which led her to found her school's Cipher & Programming Club.
• By 2023, was reaching perfect scores across multiple domestic mathematics and computing contests simultaneously.
• Attended a conference on the "Magic and Mathematics of Neural Networks" in Bucharest, Romania — one of several international academic gatherings she's taken part in outside competition.
• In 2025, qualified to Team Selection Tests in four separate Olympiad subjects in a single year, a range almost unheard of at that level.