Re: International Physics Olympiad :-)

The country (or team) scores show Iran made it to 6th position which if you put the population factor into it is pretty good. Romania again did great right below Russia. I wished a second list was given which would have the population of that country factored into it. The 5 best students of a billion people country is of course different from 5 best of an 80 million people country.
But if a low population 5 best students does a better job than a high population 5 best, then it would point to better education system in the lower population country.
So some conclusions can be drawn even when a second list with population factored in is not given. For instance in the scores below, China has half a billion people fewer than India, but all 5 students got gold, while Indians got 2 golds and 3 silvers. Iran with only 80 million population got 1 gold and 4 silvers, a difference of just one kid losing the gold to a silver compared to India with a more than 1.5 billion people. So definitely although Iran got rank 6 and India rank 4, Iranians in fact did better than Indians. Same goes for Romania which is doing really great, perhaps even better than all the other countries if you factore in the population.
India, with highest populaiton in the world (1.5 billion) should statistically be always at the top of this list. But it has never been there.
Anyway, not a bad idea if somebody here use this list and the population of the countries involved to get a more realistic result that is shown below. I bet you'll find interesting surprises in it :-) Just off the back of my head, I say Romania is really at the top. Not China. They did great in the past years too.
In UTD, a physics professor that conducted research in quantum electronics married a hot tall (but not taller than him) m,Romanian physicist woman, and back then Romania was a communist country. Once I and another friend (a student of his) were talking to him and I asked him whether he was a bit uneasy about secrets involved in his research leak to Romanians. He had no problem answering that. He said, "Hah.. it is me who wish to obtain some Romanian ideas, not vice versa!"  :-))) He did invent a few nice ways and methods. One of them was a way to create diamond using lasers, which saw immediate use in Japanese computer devices. He sued unsuccessfully for using his invention without his permission. The damning factor was the fact that the work had been done with federal government money, so it didn't belong to him.
The country score (team scores) is as follows:
G stands for Gold
S for Silver
B for Bronze
HM for Honorable Mention
Country               Rank G S B HM
People's Republic of China 1 5 0 0 0
Russia                         2 4 1 0 0
Romania                 3 3 2 0 0
India                         4 2 3 0 0
Vietnam                 4 2 3 0 0
Islamic Republic of Iran 6 1 4 0 0
Belarus                 7 1 1 3 0
Kazakhstan                 8 0 4 1 0
Syria                         9 0 2 3 0
Türkiye                10 0 2 2 1
Georgia                11 0 2 2 0
Bulgaria                12 0 1 4 0
Mongolia                12 0 1 4 0
Serbia                        12 0 1 4 0
Saudi Arabia                15 0 1 3 1
Croatia                16 0 1 2 1
North Macedonia        16 0 1 2 1
Azerbaijan                18 0 1 1 2
Bangladesh                18 0 1 1 2
Indonesia                18 0 1 1 2
Cyprus                        21 0 1 0 0
Republic of Korea        21 0 1 0 0
Thailand                23 0 0 4 1
Armenia                24 0 0 3 2
Pakistan                25 0 0 3 1
Bosnia and Herzegovina        26 0 0 2 1
Moldova                27 0 0 1 3
Malaysia                28 0 0 1 2
Mexico                        28 0 0 1 2
Uzbekistan                28 0 0 1 2
Kyrgyzstan                31 0 0 1 1
Nepal                        31 0 0 1 1
Tajikistan                31 0 0 1 1
United Arab Emirates        34 0 0 1 0
Colombia                35 0 0 0 1
Montenegro                35 0 0 0 1