Valentin Vornicu

Valentin Vornicu is a mathematician, semi-professional midstakes poker player, and software engineer, formerly at Google. Vornicu holds 13 World Series of Poker circuit rings. Valentin is from Romania and now resides in San Diego, California. Vornicu is the founder of MathLinks, an educational resource company. Before founding MathLinks, he worked as a full-stack engineer for Art of Problem Solving.

Mathematics and education
Vornicu was a part of the Romanian team for the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in 2001 and 2002. In 2002 he earned a bronze medal at the IMO. He graduated at the University of Bucharest in 2006, and got his Master's Degree in Algebra and Number Theory at the same University in 2008. In 2007, Vornicu discovered a generalized form of Schur's inequality, usually cited on online forums as "Vornicu-Schur inequality", which he published in a problem-solving book titled Olimpiada de Matematica.

Poker
Vornicu is holding 13 titles at the amateur tour, that account for circuit rings, with his biggest score coming in 2015 for $197,110.

In July 2016, he finishing 23rd in the 2016 World Professional Poker Championship for $269,430 in an event of which he held the lead after day 2.