Henadzi Karatkevich, native of Gomel, became the absolute winner of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) 2009 held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, on August, 8-15. He topped the list of 26 gold medalists leaving behind his competitors from Japan, China, Korea, USA and Poland. In its long-lasting commitment to support the talented youth ScienceSoft was a sponsor of the Belarusian team at IOI 2009.

IOI 2009 gathered more than 300 high school students from 85 countries. The fourteen-year old Henadzi was the youngest among all the contestants, and it was not his first success in this competition. He took silver in IOI 2006 in Mexico. Then followed gold medals from IOIs held in Croatia and Egypt in 2007 and 2008 respectively.

Belarus was placed 8th among all the countries according to the total number of medals awarded. Two other members of the Belarusian team contributed to this achievement: Dzmitry Bahdanau and Artem Volkhin won gold and silver medals ranking in 13th and 44th places respectively.

IOI is one of the most prestigious programming contests in the world. This year it celebrated its twentieth anniversary.