Senior Swapnil Garg is perhaps best known for his mathematical abilities. An avid participant in math olympiads and other competitions, Swapnil has been competing since sixth grade.

“At the beginning of sixth grade I was pretty bad, but I got really good really fast,” Swapnil said.

Swapnil is recognized throughout the student body for his intense skill in math, as evidenced by his proclivity for wearing t-shirts distributed at math competitions.

“He’s really the Conor McGregor of math, you know,” said Adriano Hernandez (12), Swapnil’s friend. “He’s got the brilliance but also the attitude to really go the distance, unlike anyone else I know.”

Over seven years of participating in math competitions, Swapnil has amassed a variety of distinctions: MathCounts national champion in 8th grade, a perfect USAMO index in junior year, a gold medal in the Romanian Masters of Mathematics as a representative of the United States. But upon coming to Harker, Swapnil felt the culture clash of a community that pursues excellence in all subjects, including non-math fields.

“My new group of friends was very different from anything previously. In middle school, all we did was do math competitions and play cards,” Swapnil said. “But in ninth grade, nobody did that—during lunch, you had to sit at a table and have discussions. I had to learn to be able to be more intellectual, and to provide more substance in my thinking abilities relating to things that were not just math. I was very scared of, for example, English class.”

One of Swapnil’s largest areas of growth throughout high school has been his expansion into other fields of knowledge. Swapnil believes that being introduced to Quiz Bowl specifically has helped him appreciate other subjects. In Quiz Bowl, competitors are asked questions on a diverse field of subjects, from art to history to science. Consequently, participants must have a command of diverse kinds of language to be competitive. Nowadays, Swapnil’s achievements reflect his diverse interests — he’s a USA Physics Olympiad winner, a member of the USA International Linguistics Team and a USA Computing Olympiad finalist.

“Swapnil has an astounding breadth of knowledge. He’s in Quiz Bowl, Science Bowl, and he’s doing mathematics. He has a staggering amount of knowledge,” Praveen Batra (12), Swapnil’s friend, said. “I absolutely believe that Swapnil embodies the Conor McGregor attitude in that he refuses to allow himself to be boxed in. He’s not boxed in by math; he took Modern Physics, he’s taking Nanoscience with me, he studies humanities, he studies Spanish, he does programming—he’s got so many different things he’s pursuing. I’m really curious to see what he ends up focusing on and how he intends to synthesize all these things together ultimately in his work.”

This is not to say that Swapnil’s skill at math is any the less. The mere utterance of his name evokes fear and awe amongst those in the math competition community.

“As far as I can tell, most people hear about Swapnil in the form of stories/social media/what he says before actually knowing what he’s like. He’s a legend first and then a person second (but the person definitely doesn’t disappoint),” Andrew Lin, a senior at Lynbrook High School who is a friend of Swapnil from math competitions, wrote through a Facebook Messenger interview.

Ultimately, Swapnil still believes he will pursue math in college—but other possibilities have entered his ken.

“I want to go into something that could cause me to appear in a Quiz Bowl question. It’s a measure of fame of some kind,” Swapnil said. “I think the most righteous thing to do would be to go into academia and become some kind of researcher. But I feel like saying that I want to be a mathematician is kind of an answer that avoids having to think too much. So in that regard I don’t really know. But I’m sure that, whatever I do, I’ll enjoy it.”