Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

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I went to a combined middle/high school in a small city of 200,000 in upstate New York, and no one on our Math League team distinguished themselves in any way other than by transferring to another nearby high school that had an actual IB program. At that level of engagement, Math League was all right, just something for a nerdy, unpopular teen to do to break up the monotony of dreary upstate winter evenings.

I'm more interested in this "Analysis II" the author mentions taking in his freshman year. "Analysis II" at the undergraduate level usually refers to a proof-based course on real-valued functions of several variables. Basically, a retread of Calculus III with a more rigorous foundation. But the author never mentions any mathematical results from calculus and beyond, and I'm under the impression that grade-school math competitions only target subjects in arithmetic, elementary combinatorics, and classical geometry.

In my high school the order of classes was, if I remember: Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II/Trig, Analysis. Calculus was still "after" high school at that time (early 90s), though starting to become common. So Analysis was kind of pre-calculus, a variety of different subjects that weren't quite calculus. I remember bits of algebra, probability, compound interest, etc. We didn't have Analysis I/II, but the boundaries between Algebra and Analysis were so vague that it is easy to imagine some split it differently.

It seems quite unlikely the author was referring to Real Analysis! Still I can't find nearly any reference to high school Analysis (except https://calcworkshop.com/math-analysis/), so I'm guessing that terminology is nearly gone now.

High schools in my area called the course before calculus "pre-calculus," analogously to "pre-algebra" coming before "algebra" in middle school.

Pretentious magnet/private schools call their Honors-level Calculus class Analysis to pump the egos of their students and parents, and help them cheat on college admissions.

Meanwhile, Harvard calls its honors Real Analysis class "Advanced Calculus".

But on this case it's precalculus. International Baccalaureate also uses "Analysis" to mean precalculus mathematics.

At my Alma Mater, the honours calculus course (with epsilon-delta proofs) was called the calculus.

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