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U.S. Team Wins First Place at International Math Olympiad
- philip1209 10y agoThat's great, but we shouldn't judge the state of education in our country based on outliers.
- nl 10y agoThe best and most interesting part of this was about how they trained: "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."
- douche 10y agoIt's like the top women's college basketball teams employing male practice squads to practice against[1][2][3]. 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 http://www.nhregister.com/article/NH/20110129/NEWS/301299942 [2] http://www.annarbor.com/sports/um-basketball/male-practice-players-vital-to-the-success-of-the-womens-basketball-team/ http://www.annarbor.com/sports/um-basketball/male-practice-p... [3] http://www.knoxnews.com/sports/smithey-men-find-place-with-lady-vols-on-practice-court-ep-413355583-360360441.html http://www.knoxnews.com/sports/smithey-men-find-place-with-l...
- qq66 10y agoOr Netflix sending additional synthetic traffic to their site so that it's overdesigned by design. (and, when something goes wrong, they can turn off the synthetic traffic and immediately get a little breathing room).
- pmiller2 10y agoThey do that? I had no idea. Is there an article about this and related practices they use?
- a_bonobo 10y agoI think he talks about Chaos Monkey: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-in... GitHub: https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy
- parent5446 10y ago...I don't think that's a relevant analogy at all.
- allendoerfer 10y ago
- curiousDog 10y agoReiterates the fact that the strength of America is its diversity and openness to attract and retain the brightest from around the world.
- allendoerfer 10y agoWhich is something America can be proud of. It could improve the ratio the whole society benefits from it though, when you look at what for example the Nordic countries are doing without all these rockstars at the top.
- United857 10y agoJudging from their names, most of the US team members are of Chinese or Indian descent. 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).
- adventured 10y agoIt would make perfect sense if they were educated in the US, given the US is undergoing a math boom: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math-revolution/426855/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math...
- pcurve 10y agoI would guess that they were born here, or came here as a very young child. You'd need to have fairly good mastery of English to correctly interpret those questions.
- gohrt 10y agoMaybe? The questions are translated into many languages, and many many non-Americans (especially well-educated non-Americans) learn technically capable English.
- Swizec 10y agoI came here at 26. My English tests at native levels or above (it's been ~10 years since I took the test). Most people assume I'm a native speaker until they hear my accent and even that is going away. English really isn't that hard to learn.
- lotux 10y agoChina, 19 times (from the first participation in 1985 until 2014): in every year from 1989 to 2014 except 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2007; 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
- dzdt 10y agoFor whatever reason, the US public education system has not put much effort into identifying and nurturing gifted and talented students. Probably the current resurgance of the US in this contest is due to the rise of math circles, summer camp programs, and the like outside of the school environment. There was a good article about this last year when the US team won the IMO : http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math-revolution/426855/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/the-math...
- dominotw 10y agoor as you can tell from the picture, high levels of Chinese and indian immigration in past couple of decades.
- flukus 10y ago> Ankan Bhattacharya, Allen Liu, Ashwin Sah, Michael Kural, Yuan Yao, Junyao Peng, and coach Po-Shen Loh.Credit I looked up the name of the most English sounding one, it's probably of Turkish origin.
- laxatives 10y agoAlmost all money flows to support the opposite tail, the lowest performing students. For example, No Child Left Behind, which every career educator I've spoken to believes set education in the US back a decade or more.
- allendoerfer 10y agoAll perfect scores from people of Asian descent. 1 person not of Asian descent in top 20. First girl is 63rd.
- methehack 10y agoIf you haven't read Malcolm Gladwell on Rice Farming and math you really should give it a look: http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/ http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/
- duaneb 10y agoPop psych on HN, really?
- darawk 10y agoYou could just as easily turn that around, though and say that Asians have better systems for numbers because they are inherently more gifted at numerical manipulation. But either way, winning the IMO has very little to do with calculation ability anyway.
- ojknkjnsdf 10y agoIt also has very little to do with real-life mathematics ability.
- sa1 10y agoWhat is real-life mathematics ability?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- taneq 10y agoWhy assume that it's necessarily a one-way relationship? Real life is full of these positive feedback loops. A slight innate mathematical advantage leads to a slightly better system which leads to mathematics being slightly more valuable, prompting a higher valuation on mathematical ability in one's potential spouse.
- shriphani 10y agoPo Shen Loh is one of the most inspiring math professors in the world. Pure passion for math instruction and high quality math research. While he's in charge, expect the US to produce several medals at the IMO.
- ausjke 10y agoOne key action he initiated is to put F-1 visa high school students to the IMO team, basically he is using top students from China to compete, a practice that the physics and chemistry Olympiad do not take. And guess what, that's the key to win.
- adventured 10y agoI'm always fascinated at how common it is for people (almost universally cynics from outside the US) to try to discredit the US winning this competition by proclaiming that the participants aren't really Americans, because they're of some other ethnicity than white. It usually goes like this: 'well, they're mostly Asians, so it doesn't count.' I saw it constantly with the US winning last year's International Math Olympiad, and I'm seeing it again on various forums this year. Often it comes in stealth form, they'll ask intentionally leading questions about where the competitors were educated, or where they were born, trying to avoid being too blatant about their racism and or anti-US cynicism. Some people just can't stand for the US to do well in anything.
- zasz 10y agoIt's entirely possible that some of those haters are Caucasian-Americans who don't consider Asian-Americans real Americans.
- adventured 10y agoThat hasn't been my experience so far in discussing it over the last two victories. I see it almost universally out of Europeans who prefer to think of the US as backwards on education and capability, so they'll take any angle they can to discredit the US if it achieves something in that realm.
- jonathankoren 10y agoI one time met an Asian American woman that did a graduate study in Italy. She said it was constant that the Italians always assumed she was from Asia, and never believed she was really from the United States. 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.
- Chris2048 10y ago> People outside of North America just assume that Americans Based on Just Italy?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rawnlq 10y agoI found his claim that "people are basically the same" pretty interesting. He came from a family of IMO medalists (himself, his brother Po-Ru Loh, and his sister Po-Ling Loh). So it's surprising that he believes in nurture over nature. Maybe there was really some secret sauce in his upbringing that he is now passing on via coaching?
- cjbprime 10y agoIs it surprising? Intelligence isn't 100% hereditary; maybe 50% can be attributed to genetic factors? So if you see three family members performing at world-class intelligence levels, you might actually be experiencing a nurture argument, not a nature argument. The heritability of intelligence isn't strong enough to explain that outcome through nature.
- Snargorf 10y agoIntelligence is roughly: 80% hereditary 0% from childhood environment 20% from unknown factors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTF_XVspfDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTF_XVspfDM
- yompers888 10y agoAnother front page thread tonight has multiple people saying it's 0.4 hereditary at childhood, rising to 0.75 by adulthood. Height is 0.8. I take those numbers with healthy skepticism, having not read the source material, but they aren't out of thin air.
- splouk 10y agoCould you link me that thread?
- SamReidHughes 10y agoUltimately the "environmental" factor depends on how much the environment naturally varies from family to family. Anyway, having one IMO kid is virtually not possible with most parents' genetic contribution, and there are plenty of IMO competitors with siblings that would have no hope of being such, where, if there was an environmental factor, the question was decided by the second birthday as a result of air quality, lead paint, or what music was on the radio.
- netheril96 10y agoThat many of them is of Asian descent has been mentioned a lot. Perhaps the top US universities should reconsider their soft cap of amount of Asian students admitted every year.
- chipperyman573 10y agoWhile I agree with the argument you're making, you can't exclusively use this as your evidence.
- tluyben2 10y agoThere must be research into this? I am from west EU and east EU always did much better in math. I had a few companies over there and my colleagues there told me that you study to make money which means you won't study music, languages, history etc. In NL where I grew up, people basically studied for fun and 'the job' comes automatically; I guess (!) Asia would be the same mostly?
- sergers 10y agohttps://twitter.com/urbanstrata/status/753932591514787841 https://twitter.com/urbanstrata/status/753932591514787841
- dudul 10y agoI don't have a problem with the team, but how does this tweet make sense? They are all (except one apparently) Asians, in what dystopian universe is this "diversity"? 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.
- signa11 10y agohonestly, NK scoring 168 is very impressive, imho.
- jtchang 10y agoPo-Shen Loh is a complete badass. You're the best in the room until Mr. Loh goes and finds a tiger for you to wrestle with.
- dannylandau 10y agoThis question has come up before, but never found a suitable answer -- anyone has a list of notable alumni that have participated in IMO that have gone on to do great things in life?
- stedalus 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_participants#Notable_participants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...
- aws_ls 10y agoGrigori Perelman, who became famous because of turning down the Fields Medal, including a million dollar prize, for proving the Poincare conjecture, 100 year old standing problem, despite living in near-poverty. Stuff of legends. 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.
- euske 10y agoSo this clearly shows that boys are much better at math than girls. Period. 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.
- az0xff 10y agoCompeting at the top level of any sport (athletic, mental, or otherwise) requires the right training and support almost as much as the right mindset, work ethic, and talent. The training and support requires time and money. 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.
- SamReidHughes 10y agoYour theories would be plausible if the number of girls competing at a close-to-top level wasn't outnumbered by the number of boys who by any life-background metric would have no business being there. I'm talking about trailer park kids, poor immigrants, schizophrenics, and absolute slackers here. It will take some training and practice to get on an IMO team -- because your competition is doing so -- but at levels below that, girls are outnumbered by boys making no special effort in math that just show up and get high scores on contests. 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.
- flashman 10y agoSince nobody has tackled this so far: what are the answers? And more interestingly, how do you get them?
- Cogito 10y agoFor problem 3, you can start as follows: (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)
- tuna-piano 10y agoHow much of mathematical intelligence genetic or environmental? It seems to be at least a fair amount genetic. After all, the brain is a body part like any other. Height is genetic, so why wouldn't physical brain characteristics also be? 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?
- neurostimulant 10y agoAsian parents usually regards their children's academic achievement as family prestige. As the result, the children spent a lot more time studying compared to other children from other families since young age. At the extreme end, getting scolded for getting a B is not unheard of.
- dannylandau 10y agoI'll take a shot at this (your bait). For context have an undergrad in Math, my parents are mathematicians and theoretical computer scientist. Read quite a few biographies on famous mathematicians, and one salient inescapable conclusion is that the most prominent mathematicians tend to be European or American, and very rarely Asian (chinese, Korea or Japan). There are of course exceptions, but few. The top mathematicians are not Asian, just a fact. And yet, the majority of IMO gold winners are, not sure how to explain the discrepancy, but the most likely conclusion is that solving Olympiad math questions has very little correlation with with doing creative mathematics.
- dsacco 10y agoHow many biographies did you read, and whose, by whom? It would be nice to see data in this conversation.
- chillacy 10y ago> The top mathematicians are not Asian, just a fact 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 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.
- known 10y agoDue to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_pressure#As_a_leadership_tool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_pressure#As_a_leadership_...
- liamuk 10y agoInteresting thing I heard from Po once: 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 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.
- fspeech 10y agoWhile Loh's approach is commendable that is not necessarily the approach the kids follow to be selected. IMO is kind of artificial in its subject matter so it is not true that the more math you know the higher your odds. These kids have trained very hard on their own (you have to be obsessive to get to the competitive level), just to be selected. My guess is that Loh's approach kind of loosen them up instead to giving them more of the same of what they already did on their own and this seems to have worked wonders for the highest performing kids.
- liamuk 10y agoThis is probably true. Still, a nice idea.
- supergirl 10y agoVery romantic, but I bet the real reason is not this.
- fspeech 10y ago
- ak39 10y agoI opened the link to the full question paper. I'm amazed at the level of complexity in the wording of the questions themselves. It looks like the real challenge is understanding the questions first. What are they asking? Applying math and logic is probably just as important but I feel that can only follow if you grok the crushing English/language. Which begs the question: do translations into other languages confer any advantages?
- sctb 10y agoOriginal discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12101163
- socrates1998 10y agoThe US director inviting the other people from around the world is brilliant. A great way to train your team by helping others. 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.
- _nothing 10y agoI first saw it discussed in either Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" or Dubner and Levitt's "Freakonomics". They sort of blend together in my head because I read them both over the span of a couple days and they touched on really similar themes (which I hadn't expected), but I suspect it was the former. 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.
- socrates1998 10y agoYeah, I don't really by the "they planted rice and it was tedious, therefore they are good at math." 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.