Who Is Agastya Goel, The Teen Prodigy Seen With Donald Trump After US Olympiad Win

The United States Physics Team created history at the 2025 International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) in Paris by sweeping all five gold medals for the very first time. The team included Agastya Goel, Allen Li, Joshua Wang, Feodor Yevtushenko and Brian Zhang and let’s just say, they delivered the country’s best performance in the competition’s history.

Days after the competition, the young champions were honoured at the White House, where they met US President Donald Trump who congratulated them personally. Sharing a photo of the team with the President, Trump’s aide Michael Kratsios posted on X: “Today POTUS & WHOSTP47 were proud to welcome the 2025 World Champion USA Physics Team to the White House! These incredible geniuses DOMINATED at the International

Physics Olympiad in July, bringing home a record FIVE gold medals, the greatest performance in team history.”

Today @POTUS & @WHOSTP47 were proud to welcome the 2025 World Champion USA Physics Team to the @WhiteHouse!

These incredible geniuses DOMINATED at the International Physics Olympiad in July, bringing home a record FIVE gold medals — the greatest performance in team history. 🇺🇸💪 pic.twitter.com/ZmsNRHcz95

— Director Michael Kratsios (@mkratsios47) September 22, 2025

The boy, at the centre of this triumph, is Agastya Goel.

Who is Agastya Goel?

At just 17, Agastya Goel, a junior at Henry M Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, is already a name making waves in the global academic circles. The Indian-origin prodigy is the son of Stanford professor Ashish Goel, who himself was a star student. Interestingly, he topped India’s IIT-JEE exam in 1990 before building an academic career.

Agastya, seemingly, is on the same path. He has already clinched two gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and was ranked fourth globally in 2024. That year, he scored 438.97 out of 600 while China’s Kangyang Zhou bagged a perfect score. His achievements have often been compared to his father’s, highlighting the family’s remarkable academic careers.

Beyond Physics: Music And Other Hobbies

Agastya’s accomplishments go far beyond physics. Between 2022 and 2024, he was a USACO finalist three years in a row, bagged a silver medal at the 2023 USA Physics Olympiad and attended the elite Mathematical Olympiad Program. He even contributed to PRIMES-USA and co-authored a mathematics paper published in The Australasian Journal of Combinatorics.

But Agastya is not all books and equations. On his LinkedIn, he describes himself as passionate about tennis, hiking, music and stargazing. He plays both the guitar and piano, sings in his school’s choir and even participates in the varsity tennis team. He is also part of the Gunn Competitive Programming Club and the Board Game Club, balancing academics with extracurricular activities.

When not occupied, Agastya enjoys listening to podcasts on science, economics and world affairs and that’s not all, he also enjoys playing board games with friends.

Love For Physics

Interestingly, Agastya’s love for physics blossomed only recently. Though he leaned toward computer science in the beginning, the winter of 2023 changed everything. That was when he immersed himself in Kevin Zhou’s physics handouts. Such was the interest that he spent evenings studying even during a family trip to India.

A Family of Scholars

Agastya’s father, Ashish Goel, hails from Uttar Pradesh. He studied computer science at IIT Kanpur and later earned his PhD at Stanford. Today, he is a professor of Management Science and Engineering, known for his work on algorithmic game theory and computational social science. He even played a role in Twitter’s early years, helping develop the platform’s monetisation model.

Celebration Sparks Debate

Coming back to the White House ceremony where Agastya was honoured, the photo surfaced online stirred a heated debate online instead of celebratory moments. Users pointed out that none of the medalists were white or of “traditional” American origin, with one of them even writing, “This picture alone should be enough to explain why H1B programme is important for US.” Another user, Bharat Singh, commented,“100% non white Americans, threat to American jobs, Trump should deport them.”

More voices joined in as another comment read, “LOL! Zero ‘ethnic white Americans’ on the physics team. One Russian, one Indian, and the rest Chinese—all non-white, immigrants of the 3 most hated countries in this country.”

Notably, President Trump, just a few days back, announced a $100,000 (over Rs 88 lakh) fee on H-1B visa applicants.