I lost count of how many times I had to clarify to friends and family: "No, that's not representative of that country at all. I have friends and coworkers from there who are very well educated, hard workers, and good people. And you couldn't tell them apart from the rest of Europeans. Many of them won math/programming competitions and are smarter than me."
While most companies have a negative image of those countries due to media portrayals, investment banks in London figured it out so they fly whole recruiting teams there to hire graduates, _every year_. Some Big Tech companies figured this out, too. I've seen it first hand.
That goes for almost every country, no matter how culturally or ethnically homogeneous they are. This is how stereotypes work.
Makes sense, vampires have enough time to learn advanced math.
Some time ago, I asked ChatGPT to find the winners of the Math Olympiads, their schools, and their places of birth. Most of the Olympiad winners attended elite schools in Bucharest, with few math participants coming from the south of the country and no participants who could be classified as Gypsies. But surprisingly many participants come from Transylvania.
In 2023, for example, a computer science Olympiad participant from Orăștie (Hunedoara County) won a silver medal. Orăștie is located in Transylvania and historically had a Saxon community. Brașov (Kronstadt) also recently produced medal winners: in 2025, a student from the Meșotă College in Brașov won silver at the Chemistry Olympiad. Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg) also appears on the list – a student from the Bălcescu Lyceum there won silver at the Linguistics Olympiad in 2024. Timișoara (Temeswar)—also a western city with German history—was represented by a student (Carmen Sylva College) with an Honorable Mention in linguistics. These examples support the thesis that educational centers in the former Habsburg regions produce above-average talent.
Is there any further information about the ethnic origin of the Science Olympiad participants? I would be grateful for any information (even if it does not confirm the thesis).