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> If mathematical enthousiasm is mostly developed at home, do American parents have or take less time to give kids that enthousiasm?

I am going to say something controversial when we see the the success of former soviet countries in Maths and the lack of success in central Europe and North America, despite the resources, to me, there appears to be a difference in how schooling handles suffering/frustration in those cultures.

What I mean is that often the process of learning maths needs frustration and sometimes feeling overwhelmed and you have to stay with it, until your brain re-organizes and things click.

In most western cultures there is a general sense that all learning should be fun and interesting and that children should be sheltered from frustration. I agree with it for the most part as a general principle, but I don't believe that works with the re-wiring needed to _understand_ topics in mathematics.

> success of former soviet countries in Maths [...] there appears to be a difference in how schooling handles suffering/frustration in those cultures

I agree with what you wrote, but there is yet another part of the puzzle, various extracurricular educational activities. Things like the International Mathematical Olympiad, which during its first two decades was mostly an Eastern Bloc thing; or the Russian popular-science magazine for kids, Kvant.

I suspect that these extracurricular activities were more responsible for the peak math performance in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that whatever was happening at schools. Mere school knowledge was never enough to win the math olympiad.

Going further, the reason why so much energy was spent in this direction, was that mathematics and physics were the only sciences that you could do in former soviet countries without risk of accidentally saying something politically incorrect and bringing doom on yourself and your family. (As far as I know, there was nothing in math comparable to e.g. Lysenkoism in biology. And humanities were pure ideology.) The smart people couldn't become entrepreneurs anyway, so many of them enjoyed teaching math and physics; it provided them a parallel universe they could escape to.

This is especially puzzling in presence of advanced athletics in the West and especially US. People have no problem saying "no pain, no gain" or admitting some have great genetics for sports. But as soon as it comes to mental prowess there's no aptitude, no training and nobody can fail. If a student doesn't understand something it's the teacher's fault. Oh, and rich and white kids succeed in school because their parents apparently do their homework. Parents in the USSR, with few exceptions, would laugh at their children if they asked them to do homework. Ones that did had been neurotic types who believed their child is a misunderstood genius who is being picked on by teachers.

> A question for the mathematically inclined / advanced: Where do you feel your interest in math was mostly developed?

I liked math because it was easy. And then I continued to like math because it continued to be easy. Then at a phd level and you had to write papers and do other tedious things etc, I realized I didn't care that much and learned programming instead.

My dad barely passed college algebra and my mom studied early childhood education. I had literally zero home enrichment in math. But I was put in "Gifted & Talented" in 4th grade. Ended with Ph.D. in Applied Math.

Did you have stimulating parents, or a teacher, or was it purely on grit? I’m interested!

Good teachers. But mostly interest. I wouldn't even call it grit because it wasn't hard for me.

> mathematically inclined / advanced: Where do you feel your interest in math was mostly developed?

I did pretty bad in primary school, mostly because I never did/turned in any of the homework. Whenever we took tests, I did well, but enough of my grade depended on homework assignments that my test scores didn't make up the difference. I always did well on the standardized aptitude tests (back then it was the CTBS tests) - well enough that they had to place me in the "gifted" program. That didn't actually mean anything at my school - you didn't go to different classes and weren't separated from everybody else; it was just a label applied to everybody who scored above a certain percentage on the standardized tests.

And man, did I hate math. I hated doing the never-ending worksheets of long division and thought math meant miserable drudgery. About halfway through 8th grade, I had the opportunity to start taking joint-enrollment classes at a community college. They taught me algebra there and that was when I started to enjoy math. I think a lot of that had to do with being able to move at a reasonable pace through the material rather than spending an entire year on long division.

> Where do you feel your interest in math was mostly developed?

First at home. I remember doing division by 7 and being fascinated by how the decimals repeat, before I started elementary school. Later: math books, math competitions, and math camps where university students explained advanced math concept to small kids using simple words.

I also learned a few interesting math things at high school, but it was a small part of the whole, maybe 10% or 20%.

In my opinion, to be good at math requires a combination of IQ + motivation + good learning resources. With low IQ, some things are simply too difficult or too abstract. Without motivation, you will not spend the necessary time and effort. Good learning resources (books, tutors, videos, whatever) will remind you of things you haven't considered yet, and will help you solve difficult problems by giving you easier problems first.

In perfect case, educational system should provide as good learning resources as possible, and perhaps also some motivation. It can do nothing about IQ. There is a possibility that kids with average IQ would do much better than now; but kids with high IQ would do even better.

Government school.

In home I had no one to teach me maths (parents had elementary school education and doing farming work).

But here in India government schooling is pretty good if you have interest to learn. Everything from textbooks was free.

What we were told was, until 10th grade, to learn English and Mathematics properly. Then I got into CS and that's a different story.

Government school teachers were pretty good, I learned a lot of English, science and mathematics from books in libraries and borrowed by other people as well.

Still not comparable to those who could crack olympiads and high level exams, but it doesn't take spoon feeding from 5 years of age, to grow an interest in math.