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Comment by bdavisx | Hacker News Reader

>attending Heinrich Hertz Gymnasium, a Berlin high school specializing in mathematics and science. At Heinrich Hertz, Scholze said, “you were not being an outsider if you were interested in mathematics.”

I wonder how many people like him have never reach their potential because they went to a high school where intelligence was looked down on or even could get you hurt.

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... or never reach their potential because there's a lot of random, mediocre noise masquerading as education in their environment. there are probably multiple people like Scholze aimlessly drifting in the US right now, working as unpaid interns or playing video games all day, people who are literally unaware of what they're missing.

My early fear of mathematics has a lot to do with its being taught by permanently enraged adults who seemed to view the topic as an excuse to work themselves into paroxysms of ultra-violence. I am glad to see that percussive pedagogy has fallen out of fashion.

Right you are, and the unfortunate reality is no one particularly cares either. Common Core (in the US) adds to this in its focus not on the problem, not on the solution, not on the method(s) to approach the problem, but rather on a seemingly sensible and internally coherent explanation for arriving at some sort of (not necessarily correct) solution.

Please explain what you are talking about. If I were less charitable, I'd worry you were taking an uninformed potshot at a curriculum you haven't read up on.

What is "sensible and internally coherent explanation" if not a method to approach the problem?

In the IMO, points are awarded for sensible and internally coherent explanations (commonly called "proofs").

Geez, at my high school, 33% (12) of kids in my gifted class didn't even graduate.

At 40, I finally have the time and money to actually get to play around with things I should have been learning at 16. And, I'm learning new things every day. P-adic numbers and perfectoid spaces? Wow, those things are the shit! And, I'd never even heard about them before.

Difference between wanting to and needing to.

I went to a school in the same system, Werner-von-Siemens Gymnasium in Magdeburg. They are relicts from former East Germany.

It's a bit more complicated. But the teachers were generally much better than at other schools, and interested in competitions. More kids were interested in math and sciences, but not everyone.

We regularly have math and science competitions between these kinds of schools. (And of course, my school is better than theirs. ;)

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