U.S. Team Wins First Place at International Math Olympiad
wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com
wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com
"The six student team is then brought together prior to the IMO for a three-and-one-half-week training program at Carnegie Mellon University, which is also organized by the MAA.... This year we also included ten international students — students on IMO teams from other countries. We paid for their airfare, hotel, food and teaching.... bringing in the international students gives the top US students peers. They always tell you — if you’re the smartest guy in the room, you’re in the wrong room. So we bring in these peers, who are actually at the same level as these top six. Of course that increases the level."
It makes total sense. You have to compete against those that are at least as good, and ideally, better than you are, to improve.
[1] http://www.nhregister.com/article/NH/20110129/NEWS/301299942
[2] http://www.annarbor.com/sports/um-basketball/male-practice-p...
[3] http://www.knoxnews.com/sports/smithey-men-find-place-with-l...
You seem to have missed the point of the practice by a good ways. It's about making sure your site can handle X amount of load by exposing it to X amount of load, which you manufacture if necessary. That is the same concept as exposing your math students to the competition you want them to be trained against rather than the inadequate competition you happen to have on hand.
That's called "testing". Most companies have dedicated people who do it every day. Testing and training is fundamentally different.
I like this game, so I will play the next round: This would be as if you would make the contestants wear high-altitude masks and would only allow them to put them of, when you realize they cannot come up with a solution during the competition.
Actually that's unfair and a bit of exaggeration, but especially for the kids, she /always/ overpacks.
Training against more difficult opposition than you can face in matches so when you do face the difficult opposition you're ready for that.
Not sure why you're missing that analogy.
For example, Karsten Braach, ranked 203 on the men's circuit, once beat both Venus and Serena Williams in friendly tennis games in the same afternoon. [3]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/sports/tennis/equal-pay-ge...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/womens-soccer-equal-pay-...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/observer/osm/story/0,,543962,00....
People through various means ranging from tradition to culture to watchability in bars to whims of a leader settle on a few mainstream sports.
Then, based on a million factors such as how many people watch it in which countries via which medium, whether you can squeeze in commercials during competition, whether there is a "player union" and how much sports-related accessories cost, you get paid a certain amount.
If more people watched WNBA than NBA, WNBA players would probably get paid more than NBA players even though the competition level is higher in NBA.
This money effect is also illustrated nicely by the US teams. Here the women are better than men relative to their competition, because for men there is more money in the other football (about which I know nothing, but have heard that there are some positions that need similar skills) so why would they choose otherwise if they did not plan to live or are already living in Europe?
So if I understand you correctly, this means German women have much, much better in sports as a population than their male counterparts? I mean, given that pay and success in sports follow exponential decay (best few get $hitton, next best few get a lot, rest can barely scrape by), it seems that on the women side, there's much less destroyed health and wasted dreams.
For women, you can only make a living in the first league. The distribution is the same. There are no college leagues, where people play at a professional level and get very little money. The whole system is organized around clubs. In rural Germany every village, no matter how small it is, has a church, a choir, a volunteer fire department and a football club. Each of them is at least 100 years old (> 500 for church). All social activity revolves around them. There might be alcohol involved.
In my opinion, professional sports especially in the USA is largely a matter of entertainment, and pay is determined by how popular they are. For whatever reason, if WNBA is more popular than the NBA and the female athletes get paid more, that's perfectly fine.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/sports/soccer/usmnt-uswnt-...
Clearly something must be done to address the winning gap in tennis.
With the concept of "gender," people refer to a huge social infrastructure. With "biological sex," they're trying to refer to something else.
Soviet Union, 14 times: in 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1979, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1991;
Hungary, 6 times: in 1961, 1962, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1975; United States, 6 times: in 1977, 1981, 1986, 1994, 2015, 2016;
Romania, 5 times: in 1959, 1978, 1985, 1987, 1996;
West Germany, 2 times: in 1982 and 1983;
Russia, 2 times: in 1999 and 2007;
Bulgaria, once: in 2003;[33]
Iran, once: in 1998;
South Korea, once: in 2012.
East Germany, once: in 1968
I looked up the name of the most English sounding one, it's probably of Turkish origin.
About half of public school funding comes from local property taxes, and as a result schools in rich neighborhoods have dramatically better equipment, facilities, and staff levels/pay.
There are huge disparities in school funding from one district to another, and the folks who get screwed are in poor districts, both in remote rural areas and in predominantly minority neighborhoods in inner cities.
I found this nice map in a google search just now: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools...
* * *
The No Child Left Behind law was emphatically not about diverting extra money to poor performing students, I don‘t know where you got that idea.
Some students get extra support because they have disabilities or need extra language instruction. This is not about poor performance, per se, but rather about giving extra support to specific groups of students who obviously need it. This usually relates to state/federal law.
But your run-of-the-mill poorly performing student is given woefully inadequate support by understaffed and underfunded schools, just like everyone else. The way to fix this problem is by improving teacher pay, giving teachers more time during the schoolday but outside the classroom for self improvement and collaboration, properly supplying schools and fixing their facilities, and giving teachers more local autonomy and less bullshit standardized tests.
The best performing students tend to get tracked into special classes (“honors”, “AP”, etc.), have more direct relationships with teachers, are members of school-organized extracurricular activities, and so on. They speak up more often in class, interact with other academically motivated students. Perhaps most importantly, they generally have more considerably more external support (family help from better educated parents with more free time, private tutoring, out-of-school music/art/sport/etc. training, and so on).
Did this have an negative impact on gifted program funding? Some educators definitely believe it did.
"In particular, NCLB does not require any programs for gifted, talented, and other high-performing students. Federal funding of gifted education decreased by a third over the law's first five years ... In other states, such as Michigan, state funding for gifted and talented programs was cut by up to 90% in the year after the Act became law."
Half-baked measures like NCLB (eg, make schools "accountable" and they will somehow improve magically) does nothing to resolve the "environment gap", which in my opinion is probably one of the most critical factors in academic performance these days.
Top performers are an afterthought. The USA can always import talent to build the future; there's no urgency felt to produce any here.
There isn't unlimited money for this, by choosing to spend more money on lost causes you are depriving the regular and strong students of money that could be used to enrich their education. If the bulk of effort is focused on the lowest 5% of students to the detriment of the other 95%, then it results in a worse education system overall.
People just aren't comfortable with the fact that some students will just not perform well no matter how many resources you throw at it.
You aren't those 'people' nor are your kids; you would (or will) not be saying that. I'm not one of those people either but I work with these kids and with effort people improve a lot over the educational system. I have seen kids go from failures to successes by putting effort into them and we should strive for that. The elitist view you have is painful to read. I'm not talking about the pure geniuses as they will get the attention they need but neither are you...
Yes, it sucks if you have a child with bad behavior or poor learning skills, but why is society expected to sacrifice their own children to attempt to fix yours?
It's similar to suggesting that all doctors only treat patients in the very worst conditions. A bomb goes off and the hospital spends all of their time on victims with no vital signs and ignores the people bleeding out because they still have vital signs.
I'm sorry my post pains you to read, but if you are getting that emotional about it maybe you aren't viewing things objectively?
Source needed if you want to make that a fact...
I disagree. While I want to best students to get help to be better (they are the ones who can handled difficult but important fields, and can make the next breakthroughs to make my life better), I also do not want to be supporting the worst students in Prison or Welfare, as both are a drain on society. I'm willing to accept the kids with Downs syndrome (to name just one) will never have the mental capacity to amount to much, the next level up can at least support themselves if we give them help.
Low skill manufacturing jobs are gone and they will not come back. Robots are too cheap (even in places like China or India where labor is much cheaper than the US robots can still out compete humans for some tasks). The only chance those below average kids have is if we give them enough education now that they can handle a the simpler tasks that require a brain.
Science fiction can tackle the problem of what do we do when AI is "smarter" than humans. It is an interesting problem. The reality for the next half lifetime at least is AI will not be able to beat humans in many of the jobs that require an education. Thus I want everyone who could get an education to get one.
This type of decline is hard to get out of because it's a negative feedback loop (poorly educated parents tend to poorly educate their children).
https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2015/12/04/more-educa...
It's worth mentioning that US got the only whole team full score (252 = 6 * 42) in 1994.
And it's worth mentioning that China didn't attend 1998 IMO in Taiwan for political reasons.
Knowing more than a few people who grew up in that area prior to the 1990's I think it is interesting how engineering was seen as such as a prestigious career.
Many children were encouraged to study math because it was seen as a pathway to that kind of career. I think there is some similarities with at least China and Singapore - I've had a number of Chinese interns who were encouraged to do math competitions as a pathway to Computer Science.
I think this should be something that bothers us, we do not accept and take on as an issue. When Germany performed really badly in football at the Euro 2000 and 04 (and lucked through the WC 02), it changed the team, reformed the whole system and has since had an all-German Champions League final, a World Cup win and consecutively reached every semifinal in every WC and Euro. Similarly, England pumped a ton of money into sports to score at its Olympics in London and it sure did.
(Western) Europe likes to discount these achievements by pointing at tiger moms and authoritarian education for Asia and elitist, overly performance centric instead of humanist education for America. While there is probably some truth to that and I do not think we have to change our whole system, I do not buy that Asians are simply geniuses. We should value achievements like this a bit higher and we can and should probably do a bit better even with European genes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...
There's also a lot of top mathematicians that failed miserably at the imo.
I think some fields in math are very close to this style of problems while others are so alien that good scores at the imo are a useless predictor of success for those fields.
Note too that each country can only send 6 people, and Asian countries (China, India, arguably Japan and South Korea) have a much larger pool to draw from, although this doesn't explain the prevalence of Asian-Americans on the USA team.
If forced to choose, i'd probably pick the feedback loop theory as well though.
It also seems possible that there are certain aspects of language and culture that support math achievement. Gladwell, in _Outliers_ is after this category of explanation.
Personally, I tend to like cultural explanations more than raw talent explanations because I like to think that everyone is capable of everything (eventually, if they work hard enough). I certainly like to act like everyone is capable of everything and it helps to have supporting theories.
Gladwell’s theory goes something like this: First, the counting systems tend to be more consistent, less idiosyncratic. This means kids learn them better earlier and build confidence early. This early start builds on itself — a point he comes back to over and over in his book. Second, the numbers tend to be faster to say. This means you can remember more digits — quite a few more. This has the same impact on confidence. Third — and this is his main deal — rice farming yields to careful, persistent effort much like a math problem. This is less true of western farming. All the western farming sayings go something like “there’s no accounting for the weather. sometimes your just eff’d!”. All the Asian sayings go something like “work hard and your family will prosper for generations.” He says this gives Asians a leg up in math because math yields to the same kind of persistent effort.
Also — someone below diss’d on Gladwell calling him a “pop” psychologist. I don't think he is not a psychologist, though I guess he is pretty pop. Still, what he does, while researched, is not science, that’s for sure.
I think explanations like Gladwell's are valuable even if they are not true because they at least show us how nuanced and twisty the truth might be. That keeps us looking for explanations that are maybe not so simple. That's good because as a species we're stupid enough without the crippling detriment of thinking we already understand what we do not.
EDIT: very minor for clarity.
That is definitely not the case.
EDIT: instead of french and german people, I should have said people whose native language is French or German.
It is remarkable the amount of asian and male students in this top echelon. It could be because of societal influence - but that really seems unlikely to me to cover this huge gap.
It may be unsavory, politically taboo, and not the way we want the world to be - but are males and people of asian-ancestry just better at math? And would knowing if that is the case help anything in any way?
But society factors do have an effect. In one study with asian american women asked to do a difficult math test, those primed to remember that they were asian did better than those primed reminded that they were female: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/10/1/80.abstract
It is a conventionally believed thing, but I think it is conventionally misunderstood. The IQ tests don't even have validity well outside 2 s.d. (how could they without much more testing outside the sample?) It's not even a particularly valid statistical idea to be contemplating very high IQs beyond the normed values of the tests (how are they supposed to calibrate the scale?) nor is there good evidence that whatever the measures are that we're given are normally distributed. I have personally known several people with "measured IQs" above 200; that is statistically not supposed to happen. There are a lot of conceptual and practical problems with the idea of IQ.
Regarding mathematical ability, please see this paper by the former USA IMO coach Titu Andreescu.
http://www.ams.org/notices/200810/fea-gallian.pdf
They make a very good case for cultural specific factors in the development of mathematical skill, at least as far as Olympiad maths goes. The presence of women in the competition varies dramatically depending on the culture (and even the team)
An easy way to measure above +2 z-scores is to administer an IQ test at a much earlier age than usual. That's what the famous Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth did. It has proven to be super effective even at the extreme right tail of the curve.
[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4b8ThyfDgzs/U29nQEBAQTI/AAAAAAAAE4...
> I believe you're incorrect regarding the variance in male IQ vs female.
Belief doesn't enter into it. Many studies report higher male variance and it is widely known in the psychological community. While people try and attack this as a recruitment pattern problem (see [2]) or try to prove that it is partly cultural (see [3]), only people unfamiliar with the literature would outright deny it.
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289608... [3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289610...
What's emphatically not true is assuming a normal distribution -- specifically out to the tails. It's not even clear that the variance doesn't turn around at some point to have higher female variance at the top end of the curve. It is extremely easy to synthesize violations of a normal distribution of ability for female subjects -- there seems to be a powerful threshold effect that, in addition to cutting out large numbers of young women in certain cultures in mathematical competition, tends to preferentially spare the very top. If things were normally distributed, of those women that compete in mathematics competitions, almost none would make it to the very top of the competition, mathematically. That has been proven empirically false.
Few scholars directly assert that the normal distribution is a perfect model for intelligence, but people seem to take the implications quite seriously.
I'm pretty sure they're mistaken on that front.
Your graph shows that this study administered a SAT Math test at a much earlier age, not an IQ test.
The study itself says: "Before age 13, these participants scored within the top 0.01% for their age on either SAT mathematical reasoning ability (SAT-M 700) or SAT verbal reasoning ability."
I'm unconvinced that this shows either way if "IQ tests [don't] even have validity well outside 2 s.d"
(I agree with the evidence of gender variance in IQ though. An unpaywalled copy of the second article is at https://tip.duke.edu/about/research/intelligence_article.pdf an is interesting reading.)
As for the IQ test variability, do you have any papers or research on that? Citation 19 in this wikipedia article doesn't seem to actually address the issue of variance, only the question of absolute ability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...
May I recommend as a starting point:
Be skeptical about the idea of a single number characterizing intelligence. We don't even do that for the weather.
Next, learn about the genesis of the entire IQ concept, and later efforts to academically justify past ideas about intelligence. The first really popular writings were by Galton
http://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/text/pdf/galton-18...
Afterwards, Binet and Simon, and Terman (at Stanford, the Stanford in Stanford Binet) get at it.
Back then, IQ was really a "quotient," "mental age" divided by actual age. The concept only really makes sense in a developmental context -- after all, how are we supposed to believe that a "developmentally baseline" 23 year old is actually the pinnacle of intelligence?
Only after this did the Weschler Adult Intelligence scale come in. Read (some) of the criticisms Weschler had of the Stanford Binet here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Sc...
This was devised as a clinical scale. This is still one of the only widely administered and normed tests. The norming takes place only over a few thousand individuals. The types of abilities typical in an international IMO context are simply unlikely to show up in these cases, much less register statistically in the test!
It's also important to learn about the hypothesis behind "Spearman's g", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
and the mathematics behind what suggested it, "Factor Analysis," which has many capabilities but is worthy of many criticisms, including particularly that there is no obvious weigh to norm or weight any of the tests, so ultimately you end up with a judgement call for which tests to include, and how much to gather from their results.
A far more enlightening study of genius, I have found in the book "Human Accomplishment", by Charles Murray. When you're sample is all of those humans who have left a mark on history, and your measure is impact, and our remembrance of it, you learn far more about the heights of human capability, I believe, than by scoring how well people match patterns to a preconceived idea of the "right answer" on a test.
The same Charles Murray who co-authored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve ?
> The Bell Curve argues that:
> Intelligence exists and is accurately measurable across racial, language, and national boundaries.
> Intelligence is one of, if not the most, important factors correlated to economic, social, and overall success in the United States, and its importance is increasing.
> Intelligence is largely (40% to 80%) heritable.
> No one has so far been able to manipulate IQ to a significant degree through changes in environmental factors—except for child adoption—and in the light of these failures, future successful manipulations are unlikely.
> The United States has been in denial of these facts. A better public understanding of the nature of intelligence and its social correlates is necessary to guide future policy decisions.
And who then went on to argue in Human Accomplishment that the most important humans were European males based on a biased application of Pagerank on modern encyclopedias written in English?
Not sure how he fits into this.
I thought similar things about Charles Murray, and I don't think that the Human Accomplishment book is without flaws -- it has many. Nonetheless, the whole book is worth reading. Honestly, I think it faces some serious facts on the distribution of impact on civilization.
The fact that some cultures, like classical Athens and Elizabethan and Enlightenment England, have had an outsized impact on modern science and civilization, that we have a massive debt to particular thinkers from Europe of the past few centuries, is a fact I think a serious study of great scientists needs to come to terms with. That being said, past contribution is not a good indicator of genetic, racial superiority! We should do well to ask what made those contributions possible, from nurturance, to growth, to self belief, and belief in the idea of progress.
> nurturance, to growth, to self belief, and belief in the idea of progress.
I'd also guess: encouraging risk taking; valuing radical ideas, or at least individualism; and a safe environment, or at least a sufficient military.
Alright I'll bite as well. Though I don't think the OP's conclusion is correct, I also don't think the lack of prominent asian mathematicians is entirely indicative of ability or creativity, but rather largely caused by the availability bias of English speakers and our current vantage point in history.
First: availability bias. We're reading English books and working within an education system born out of Europe. Asian history has been full of interesting wars, rulers, artists, politics, etc for thousands of years, but few in America will ever learn anything except for where it relates to America / Europe. Much of the information about Asian history will be in another language as well.
Second: Recent history. Knowledge-creators in other countries are playing a game they are disadvantaged in, having to first learn English, then travel abroad for the best universities, etc. (Imagine if you had to learn Japanese and travel to Japan to go to get a decent higher education!)
The reason of course is that 1500s and onwards (post-renaissance), most of the knowledge generation was happening in Europe. But that wasn't always the case: if we look a thousand years prior, or 2 thousand years prior, knowledge was being generated by Greek, Arab, or Chinese mathematicians. For instance, the concept of 0 arrived to Europe pretty late: http://www.livescience.com/27853-who-invented-zero.html
So circling back to the original question of the importance of genetics vs environment:
That the world's patches of knowledge has shifted across different cultures, peoples, and places over the last maybe 8 thousand years to me doesn't imply such a large importance on inherent genetic ability, and that time frame is too short for any evolutionary changes.
Culture seems to be a much larger factor (and this is where I will concede that asian culture can stifle creativity). Culture is the main difference between the heads down religious conviction of the 9th century in Europe and the renaissance, not genetics.
It is also false to consider Europe being a laggard in earlier times just because it was behind in maths and higher learning. One tends to think the Roman empire was so superior due to its progress in the arts and sciences. However medieval Europe saw far more progress in e.g. machinery and labour saving devices. Windmills, waterwheels, better plows etc was developed in this period.
In the short term the unit of China reaped a lot of benefits in the form of having much more peace. Europe suffered many setbacks due to the frequency of wars. But in the long run this proved a benefit. The fierce competitive nature of westerners could not be countered by harmony focused asian cultures.
China of course started taking off recently too after capitalist reforms in the 80s. The US, arguably one of the most "pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps" of nations has done pretty well, despite lack of social programs. And back to Europe, I do think it was held back due to the forced conformity to the Church (IMO Christianity held back European science for hundreds of years).
So yes, culture is a very big current as far as steering people!
Those who awarded the Fields medal to Terrance Tao, Ngô Bảo Châu and Manjul Bhargava may disagree.
There are large regional differences between intelligence, but they are explained with environmental factors:
1. parasite load and infectious diseases are strongly negatively corrected with intelligence. This applies between different countries and between states in United States.
2. Nutrition, prenatal nutrition is very important. Intelligence correlates with height. Most likely common cause for this correlation is nutrition.
3. Then comes other things like culture etc. Natural abilities can be enhanced with hard work and cultural incentives. In some cultures mathematically gifted may become lawyers. Edward Witten got degree in history and became a journalist. He published articles in The New Republic and The Nation and worked in George McGovern's presidential campaign. His physics and math carer came later.
As for math, why have Russia and the Soviet Union won so much if Asians have such advantage? They have much smaller population than China? Why does Hungary have so many wins? How many asian immigrants do you think they have? Considering the small population of Hungary they are completely outperforming China.
"P-S.L.: I don’t want to say it’s genetic. A lot of people say you must be born with something very special. Maybe once in a while, you may see something like that. But people are basically the same."
That would be my guess too. For instance, in France, some of the most prestigious "schools" base their selections on maths. It's interesting to see some students that got all the possible help from their rich family (very best schools, tutors...) being totally outcompeted by kids that grew up in much less favored environment. With maths, it seems either you have it or you don't.
I think there is a lot of truth to this. I drew better than my peers and I tended to do better in math. But if I reflect on it, I'd say it was mostly about interest. I drew a lot of drawings as a kid and I obsessed a lot about problems which are mathematical in nature. I wanted to understand how things worked. It wasn't enough to just get the right answer. I had to know why it was right.
The people I talk to who aren't very good at math typically strikes me as simply having no curiosity for why things work the way they do. They just want the answer and move on.
My brother e.g. has no curiosity like that, but he was born with better math skills than me. He could always do mental arithmetic better than me e.g. But as soon as math started getting abstract he fell behind me. Ability simply can't carry you if you have no motivation, curiosity or desire.
I believe "genes for math" is simply genes for having a personality that is curios and patient.
The key to the American team's recent success is forgetting about the IMO and just learning math. Instead of teaching mechanics-- techniques specifically for solving olympiad problems (as they had done a lot of before, and as many countries do), the idea was to just show interesting and fun things from real math and build strong intuition for mathematical problem solving through that. If you look at lecture's he's given in the past at MOP: http://www.math.cmu.edu/~ploh/olympiad.shtml, you can see they're mostly just highlights from his area of research.
When he was being considered for coaching he told the MAA he would run training for the IMO team in a very different way from how it was done and how and that choosing him would be a gamble: there was a chance that it would go spectacularly wrong. The gamble has seemingly paid off.
It's also nice that this is a quintessentially American way of doing things :) Just pursue what you find fun and it'll pay off. Don't over-optimize for the accolades.
Honing one's problem solving skills by tackling math problems framed in the real world
Nothing is gained by opening the floodgates to average and below average intelligence people, who we have already have a native surplus of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
Of course, the modern welfare state cuts against that, as do the harmful externalities imposed by (eventual) voting. But the humane solution here - which might be politically impossible - is to allow immigration while eliminating the welfare state and making the newcomers into a permanent non-voting underclass.
Beneficial to who? Factory owners - yes, factory workers - no ...
But factory workers are consumers too and gain (less visible) benefits from immigrants. I.e. if you work at factory X but consume goods produced at factory Y, you benefit from cheaper labor at factory Y. If you work at factory X but consume medicine, you benefit from having an Indian doctor and a Filipina nurse.
Assuming the savings are passed on to the consumer.
I think it's more important that the owners vastly benefit, and may manage to push down wages across more than just one industry by leveraging economic differences between nations that only they can take advantage of.
If the political climate allows a separate class of citizens, then there is no need to eliminate the welfare state.
I'd like to see you prove that claim while defining exactly what you mean by a surplus.
To a certain extent, this principle is applied today. But I imagine it could be scaled up to something akin to highly selective university admissions process (e.g. interviews, standardized testing, resume critique, references). If a country starts with sufficient desirability, this could result in a positive feedback loop -- an increasingly competent and productive society.
That is simply not true. Most countries do not have the demand, willpower or money to sustain, say, a world-class research institution.
The part of Appalachia I grew up in for example, in Maryland, had among the best public schools in the state, and had among the highest testing outcomes in the state. That's still true to this day.
I'd like to see you prove your claim and define what a surplus of below average intelligence people means.
Given the small population base of Appalachia, you're not providing meaningful evidence of anything by referring to that location. The median standard of living in Appalachia is higher than that of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Russia, China, Latin America, and so on.
> The median standard of living in Appalachia is higher than that of Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy.
Fuck, that's bad news for Europe, I suppose. I knew people that had dirt floors and no indoor plumbing.
That isn't a very strong data point. The median household income in Appalachia - which also includes eg Pittsburgh - is above all but a dozen or so major nations, and is above that of the EU and Eurozone. The unemployment rate there is also lower than the EU and Eurozone (in fact, it's about ~45% lower).
Unemployment numbers are mostly bullshit, to boot. Depending on which set of them you are using, that can have huge discrepancies with the actual labor force numbers percentages, since after so many months of a hopeless situation, people drop off the unemployment rolls and into the masses of the long-term unemployed.
For the record, my Appalachia town also had good schools, though we had more than our fair share of meth and poverty as well.
Good on you. We had the poverty, although weed was the favorite cash crop, rather than meth. Growing some plants out in the woods is easier to hide than a lab that might blow up and catch the double-wide on fire...
Care to give a reference?
Would be interesting to note if they were US born/raised (i.e. educated under the US educational system), or recent immigrants (i.e. primarily educated in those countries).
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math...
The state hands rights, exemptions and benefits only in so far as not doing so would result in violence.
If you are tame there's no reason to give you anything.
I learned a foreign language to fluency at age 17, and math is one of the easiest things to read in the second language because the grammar is never very creative and the vocabulary is much more restricted than a novel or even a typical newspaper.
(Tangentially, a lot of people born in raised in India speak English at near-native levels. Especially the well-educated classes that would be likely to move to the US and participate in something like this.)
English really isn't that hard to learn.
"At least 5000 people bought my books..."
Don't ask me why, but to me it should read instead:
"at least 5000 people have bought my books,"
or even:
"over 5000 people have bought my books."
Indeed they did, until very recently[0]. I had no idea.
[0] http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/more-than...
Also, what you're describing goes beyond native level English and reaches the level of professional writer/teacher/linguist/editor/etc level English. I would expect many HN readers to have English proficiency beyond native level.
As for errors, I've noticed that spending time in the US and using colloquial English a lot, has wreaked havoc on my English grammar. Or maybe it's the distance from schooling that did it.
When White people do well at something, people update their prior that White people experience White privilege that makes it easier for them to achieve these things.
When non-White people achieve something, or White people do poorly, people update their prior that diversity is important to achieving good results.
He also figure in sibling comment list. I read a book called Perfect Rigor, in that if I remember right, he could easily solve all the seven problems. Which happens rarely. Surely a living (and also tragic) genius. I get goose bumps just by typing this comment.
[0]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/athletics/2016/07/07/seven-kenyan...
People outside of North America just assume that Americans come in two colors: white and black. And why wouldn't they? That's all the American entertainment industry shows.
Based on Just Italy?
Why is this "racism" or "anti-US" cynicism?
Maybe there was really some secret sauce in his upbringing that he is now passing on via coaching?
If you grew up in a family of bodybuilders, you would emphasise training, because your brothers who didn't train would look fairly ordinary. You'd acknowledge that you all had similar premises all well, thanks to genetics.
The secret sauce is probably an intense interest brought about by being in a family where everyone is talking about math all the time.
However, this fact should not deter our attempts to provide everyone with equal opportunity to pursue the life they desire.
While he's in charge, expect the US to produce several medals at the IMO.
And guess what, that's the key to win.
And the dominance of Asians is interesting. It's a very cultural thing.
I can't remember who proposed it, but the idea that East Asian languages are much easier to learn basic counting is interesting.
The idea is that Chinese, Korean and Japanese all have easier languages for counting. This gives young Asian students a small, but real advantage when first learning math that accelerates as time goes on.
I would be interested to see how many of the top math Asian-American or Asian-Anglo students know one of those three languages or not.
If a lot of them have zero knowledge of Chinese, Japanese or Korean, then clearly this idea is dead.
Wherever I read it, they listed it as just one of several reasons Asians tend to be good at math, with cultural factors being another important factor. Something about how, while Westerners generally had to just plant wheat and similar crops at a specific times and they would grow fine with a base amount of effort, the yield of a rice paddy was directly related to the effort put into maintaining it. According to them, this ingrained (hah, grain) into Asian societies the idea that your success is directly proportional to the effort you put into something.
I haven't studied it myself, but I thought that theory was interesting.
For a long time, Westerners were dominant in math.
It's only very recently that we have seen East Asians doing well. And, I don't know that it persists at the graduate/top level, it may only be at the high school and undergrad level.
I mean, East Asians have been growing rice for a really long time, so why does it mean now they are good at math.
Who knows, it's an interesting phenomena.
(1) The points of the polygon are inscribed on a circle. [given]
(2) Construct a triangle on each side of the polygon with the centre of the circle from (1) as the third point.
(3) Each triangle from (2) is isosceles. [2 of the sides are radii of the circle from (1)]
(4) The area of an isosceles triangle can be given as 1/2a^2sqrt((b^2)/(a^2)-1/4) where a is the length base of the triangle and b is the length of each of the other two sides. [proof left to the reader!]
(5) The square of each side of the polygon is divisible by n. [given]
(6) For each triangle from (2), double its area is divisible by the square of the side it is built on. [from (4), (6.1)]
(6.1) sqrt((b^2)/(a^2)-1/4) is an integer. [proof missing]
(7) For each triangle from (2), double its area is divisible by n. [from (5) and (6)]
(8) The area S of the polygon is equal to the sum of the triangles from (2). [by construction]
(9) If n divides a and b then it divides a+b
(10) 2S is divisible by n, QED. [from (7), (8), and (9)]
Of course, this is not complete.
For example, we also have to show that 2S is an integer, which really comes down to showing that sqrt((b^2)/(a^2)-1/4) is an integer. I should add, this is also needed for (6) as if that statement is not an integer than (6) is false.
[edit] I've added the missing step (6.1) though it is incomplete for now.
[edit 2] Actually, the missing step is different! The sum of the (6.1) pieces from each triangle needs to be an integer, not each individually (though if you could prove individually than you would get together, obviously).
[edit 3] I'm silly! We know that 2S is an integer because of the general form of the area of a polygon, given vertices (x_1, y_1), (x_2, y_2) etc. That is:
S=1/2(x_1y_2-x_2y_1+x_2y_3-x_3y_2+...+x_(n-1)y_n-x_ny_(n-1)+x_ny_1-x_1y_n)
As each x and y are integers, then 2S is an integer.
There are still issues, because (6) is still not known to be true (and in fact may not be true at all)
Which begs the question: do translations into other languages confer any advantages?
Or not.
Sometimes I wonder if these competitions (or the real Olympics games for that matter) lead to a more racial/social prejudice, rather than diminishing them.
At present, people of different ethnicities have a disproportionate share of wealth, and thus fewer resources that they can spend on training and support. Support begins early: parents help their children find the right activity to undertake and also teach them the mentality to work hard at it in order to compete -- this is almost impossible to accomplish if those parents have to be away most of the time because of financial constraints.
As for gender, we have only recently entered an era where we recognize that girls are equally capable of doing things like math at a top level (the first Fields Medal given to a woman was given to them quite recently). In girls' formative years, parents still have some subconscious expectations of what their children are capable of -- perhaps being reluctant to expose girls to the sciences or other serious undertakings. There are some recent efforts to get girls into these things, but the fact that they are newsworthy proves that it's not the norm yet. The time that there will be equal female representation in these areas will be when an entire generation understands that women and girls are equally capable of getting into them. This will be after everyone who comes from the previous era of society have died.
Realize that anybody that would be at, say, top-500-high-school-students-in-USA math level will be the sort of student that coasts through all their math classes from K-12, with the typical schedule taking pre-calc in 10th grade, with no studying and no stress at all, easily the best in their class, assuming the school system just ignores their talents. There would have to be 250 girls in this situation, of which those that finish over the top 500 threshold on things like the AMC or AIME or earlier contests are outnumbered by boys with less "support" that just show up and get high scores on math contests.
Also, in my experience in middle school there were many girls that were quite competitive in 24 game, that just disappeared in more mathy contests like MathCOUNTS.
Sometimes I feel sad that we took a nice word "diversity", and perverted it to mean basically "anybody except white males".
And just to be clear, if these guys are on the team it's probably cause they are the best, so they all deserve to be there, and I wouldn't want to kick 2 of them out just to add a girl and a white guy.