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While I do not think that you have to win competitions like this, you should probably aim for a placement at least roughly corresponding to your GDP and importa

While I do not think that you have to win competitions like this, you should probably aim for a placement at least roughly corresponding to your GDP and importance in world politics. I mean Germany is deciding the faith of Europe during difficult times, but places behind small and/or poor countries like North Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and so on? 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.

orbifold 10y ago
I know a few IMO participants from Germany, a lot of those that perform extremely well also end up as awesome research mathematicians (Faltings, Scholtze) I am not sure the same can be said of the other countries.
- nl 10y ago
  There have been 14 non-German Fields medal winners who were former IMO medallists, so they seem to have done ok[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_participants#Notable_participants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...
- allendoerfer 10y ago
  What you are hinting reminds me of my e-sport days. At some point, when the game I liked was dying, European professionals moved on to other games. At first Koreans were still playing and would win all the remaining European competitions, later they moved on, too, and the remaining clubs all bought Chinese teams.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  Some top imo scorers will end up as great math researchers but that's far from a trend. 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.

orbifold 10y ago

I know a few IMO participants from Germany, a lot of those that perform extremely well also end up as awesome research mathematicians (Faltings, Scholtze) I am not sure the same can be said of the other countries.

nl 10y ago
There have been 14 non-German Fields medal winners who were former IMO medallists, so they seem to have done ok[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_participants#Notable_participants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...
allendoerfer 10y ago
What you are hinting reminds me of my e-sport days. At some point, when the game I liked was dying, European professionals moved on to other games. At first Koreans were still playing and would win all the remaining European competitions, later they moved on, too, and the remaining clubs all bought Chinese teams.
77pt77 10y ago
Some top imo scorers will end up as great math researchers but that's far from a trend. 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.