64 ms·

Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

• mjparrott 6y ago
  The anecdotes of "I moved from school X to school Y and one was more rigorous than the other" are interesting, but I'm not sure they're representative of entire systems. In the US, you could switch between schools that are 10 miles apart from each other and have the same experience because school quality is not that homogeneous.
• lymeeducator 6y ago
  Curious, with 2 smaller grade school children in the Midwest, that I am now "home schooling" during the pandemic, I find the teachers spend minimal time on math and I have to supplement them...a lot.
• jonnypotty 6y ago
  Queue a load of people extrapolating their own personal experiences into generalisations covering the entire country
• penetrarthur 6y ago
  I was taught in university by soviet professors and had to study soviet textbooks and from what I can tell, Soviet textbooks are extremely steep and unfriendly. There is not a single odd word and it even feels like they had to save the paper. Text is often describing schemes that are 5-10 pages before. It takes significantly more concentration to understand the whole thing. It feels like authors used to compete in the precision of information rather than making it more available for someone who is going to read it. On the other hand, books from USA tend to be more friendly and will first explain the basic intuition and only then dig deeper if necessary.
• gnrlbzik 6y ago
  When I moved to Canada in 98 from Belarus, I had minimal language knowledge. I was also half way through school year. After my testing was done I was put in to next grade. Even though I was not the best student in my home country, prolly mediocre at best. With some subjects being better than others, still it was surprising to me. By next school year I also felt that science classes were way behind what I was used to, and even though I could only read and barely understood instructions, I still was able to do very well in all of my stem classes despite lack of language knowledge. Honestly it was kind of annoying that I had to do things that I already have done in previous grades. As I have started getting better with English and started paying less attention in class and less to my homework, eventually I fell somewhat behind.
• mnw21cam 6y ago
  "Please enable Javascript and refresh the page to continue" I don't want to "continue", I would just like to read the article.
• steve76 6y ago
  The answer points to ingenuity due to a lack of resources which is susceptible to obsolescence. School in the USA does a lot more than just educate, for instance child protection services and employment. The USA also takes everyone, specifically the violent and malicious, due to compassion. The USA suffered: - multiple World Wars - a fifty year Cold War that was just as bad - multiple nuclear standoffs - horrific terrorism - black market drug smuggling, probably the gravest problem today - repeated invasions - a Civil War which involved foreign intervention - attempts at colonial occupation - originally being made as a death camp and penal colony
• rurban 6y ago
  Easy answer: Russia's education was for engineers, US for snowflakes. Also it extents to CS. It's 10x easier to find competent Russian programmers than in the US. They are dominating the various math contents or chess for decades.
• rurban 6y ago
  Easy answer: Russia's education was for engineers, US for snowflakes. Also it extents to CS. It's 10x easier to find competent Russian programmers than in the US. They are dominating the various math contests or chess for decades.
• hintymad 6y ago
  Economic reasons aside, I think Soviet educators also believe that rigorous and challenging training will realize the greatest potential of students. The top students are self-driven and usually get the best resources anyway. It is the majority middle that need most rigorous and challenging training to realize their full potential. Unfortunately, US educators in K-12 decided to move in the opposite direction. David Klein's writing told appalling and sad stories of how National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NTCM) won over the course of last 100 years: - A quarter century of US 'math wars' and political partisanship - A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century By the way, US's upper-level college course and post-graduate textbooks are hardcore too. If you don't believe me, go check out the Graduate Texts in Mathematics.
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I still think the US/The West model won this battle.
• nickik 6y ago
  What all of this shows is that education and economy are really not very related. This book makes the case: > The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money What happens is that companies just hire people who have proven that they are not dumb enough to drop out of school and just did what they had to to move on with their lives. In the end the Western countries are richer, not because the students are great, but because they have great opportunity and learn what they need to, so they can get that opportunity. The Soviet Union really was great at showing this, lots of super smart people, good schools, lots of government investment in high tech, more effective intellectual property theft then China now, cheap natural resources, cheap oil and so on. Jet they couldn't really make a competitive economy. Teach people the basics as efficiently as possible, show them where they can learn more if they want to, give them some resources to do so if they want to and let them find their way in a market economy.
• radkapital 6y ago
  This website contains contains links to lot of these textbooks - https://mirtitles.org https://mirtitles.org
  • webdva 6y ago
    Thanks.
• droithomme 6y ago
  Right. So there was a global consensus, promoted by certain folks, that adherence to academics was the secret to national success. And the Soviets bought in to that propaganda, to their detriment. They spent a fortune and produced the most well-educated and thoughtful population in human history. A couple of their satellite states even achieved genuine 100% literacy. Not 100% rounded but 100% exact. The campaign thus was a success. It was amazing. Fortunes were spent on the totally unimportant goal of an egalitarian society where everyone is respected and helped. Being smart isn't how you succeed as top dog in this era. edit: Downvotes away uneducated ignoranti with no counterpoints! Yee haw!
  • yters 6y ago
    How do you succeed as top dog in this era?
  • thomashobohm 6y ago
    What are you even talking about?
  • TimTheTinker 6y ago
    > Downvotes away ignoranti! Not a mod, but that’s against the HN guidelines and is likely to keep your comment grayed out. I thought the rest of your comment was interesting, FWIW.
    • axguscbklp 6y ago
      Personally, I gravitate towards grayed-out comments. I think that they tend to be likely to be on one or another extreme side of the intellectual bell curve. Basically, they end up grayed out because either they are too dumb or too smart for the average Hacker News user. So if I manage to run an effective mental filter to discard grayed-out comments that are on the low side of the intellectual gray curve, then gravitating towards grayed-out comments makes it more likely that I am exposed to content that is in the highest intellectual range of Hacker News comments as a whole.
      • 6y ago
• seibelj 6y ago
  Soviet body builders only used free weights and a pull-up bar. You don’t need anything but that to get big muscles. Similarly, you don’t need anything except a chalk board to teach math and most other subjects.
  • partiallypro 6y ago
    But you do need a computer to teach programming (generally.) The US has generally been about efficiency, there isn't much need wasting time on paper with a problem when we can understand the concept and solve the problem with a computer. That's my opinion of course, as an American. So I'm biased. When I was taking advanced math classes, my first thought when presented a concept was "how can I solve this by writing a calculator program to do it for me." Maybe that isn't common, I don't know, but while it might not be what everyone does...I think that is the American thinking on learning things.
    • gowld 6y ago
      This is also why Dijkstra said Americans did hardware and programming while Europeans did theoretical computer science.
    • silentwanderer 6y ago
      Mathematics and problem solving are not mutually exclusive - understanding one is usually a sign you understand the other. Programming is just a layer of abstraction over one of these things.
    • rimliu 6y ago
      I actually am very glad that we did not have computers in my school at the end of the 80ies. This was in Lithuania, then a part of the USSR. We had programming classes, so without the computers we were taught the basic concepts: variables, assignment, conditions, loops. Just concepts in a pseudolanguage. Later, when I had access to the computers learning the languages boiled down to "what's the syntax for this concept?" And then writing my programs with a pen and paper because I had no computer at home for a few more years. Now I sometimes shake my head when I see comments like "I do not know programming, which language (or worse—fraamework) should I learn?" It is so tempting to say "duh, learn programming and worry about the languages later".
• downerending 6y ago
  In a US college in the 80s, the math professors definitely seemed to be in awe of the Russians when it came to this stuff. And though I was in the US, early on I was in an utter hardware wasteland, and I do think that not having much hardware access improved my ability to just sit and think about things with pencil and paper.
  • jschwartzi 6y ago
    Similarly, working on products with no debugger and a single LED for a UI meant that I had to reason very carefully about how the code I wrote worked. If I made a mistake there would be no feedback other than the behavior of the product.
    • madengr 6y ago
      Funny, that’s how I presently program microcontrollers.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  I can only assume but culture makes things very different. I often said that French abstract algebra books stopped me from learning for 10 years (after many serious attempts). One book from Garreth Williams unlocked 80% of my issues. The shocking part was the approach. It was very operational, you calculate, you manipulate concrete data. In French books it's all theorems and concepts. Learning curve to make a Haskeller faint. And that book is not the only instance, Gilbert Strang lectures on youtube are also similar in style. It also correlates with the pragmatic engineering of US history (electricity comes to mind).
  • ngold 6y ago
    Thank's for the insight. I struggled with geography until I discovered history...again, after high school of course. I still struggle with algebra, so I look forward to checking your suggestions out. I think my problem as a kid was I was just hyper, all the time. I could cut wood outside for 10 hours but couldn't sit still for a moment.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      Child labour is an untapped resource. If it were somehow possible to let kids chop wood for 10hrs, as the need arose, or whatever, and then they could go / go back to school when they were ready. Certainly would have helped me a lot.
      • zozbot234 6y ago
        Agreed. There is a severe lack of mindfulness and focus in modern education, and strenuous physical exercise like chopping wood can be a real mindfulness-workout.
    • thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > I struggled with geography until I discovered history Tangentially, a lot of fantasy authors seem to love maps for their own sake, and provide maps of their world as illustrations. I never saw the point of these; the map never really matters to the story. But history books provide almost the same number of maps -- usually one, before the discussion of whatever -- and it just isn't enough. Those maps really matter to understanding whatever was going on; in the real world, geography is a huge deal.
• fouc 6y ago
  My dad took the advanced courses for physics, math, organic chem in first year University of Toronto in 1970. I've seen his textbooks and they were on the same level of this. Much more advanced than what I saw in the 90s/00s. More focus on reasoning from first principles, less focus on easily approachable material. Basically I'm saying that baby boomers had more advanced textbooks in their university period compared to what their kids got in the 90s/00s. But also less people went to university back then, it was more rigorously academic back then.
  • Guest42 6y ago
    Yes, I think that websites are an analogous in the sense that eventually adding features starts to get in the way
  • throw1234651234 6y ago
    I find this to be true. It seems like there was more focus on the very, very basics. Now there is a ton of filler and the content gets lost. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
• virmundi 6y ago
  America did this too. There was the New Math trend in the 50-60s which feels like common core. Here's a comedy song about it from that era.https://youtu.be/UIKGV2cTgqA https://youtu.be/UIKGV2cTgqA
  • huy-nguyen 6y ago
    I love Tom Lehrer!
  • jnbiche 6y ago
    New Math was very far from Common Core. New Math included generous coursework on abstract algebra and discrete mathematics, both of which are almost entirely ignored in Common Core. Common Core is carefully considered, but pretty traditional. Common Core is still a good curriculum for the minimal level of math US society wants primary and secondary students to learn. But it's not nearly expansive and innovative as New Math was.
• 5revive 6y ago
  speaking from personal experience, the math I learned up to grade 4 in the Soviet Union was enough to glide through all of American high school math. And I wasn't in any way an advanced math student in the USSR. And I dont seem to recall any extensive, South Korean style homework.
  • freepor 6y ago
    You are probably really gifted. I don't think this is a typical experience, that a fourth grader in any country who doesn't do much homework knows most of US high school math.
    • 5revive 6y ago
      In my Soviet school, we went up to Grade 10 US high school math and I have a clear memory when my old knowledge stopped and I had to actually learn. Up to that point it really did feel like just redoing old classes again.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• peter_d_sherman 6y ago
  Excerpt: "At the risk of oversimplifying, I noticed that because of the traditional scarcity of equipment, Russian students and scientists had to think rather than experiment, whether with computers or accelerators; it was often all that was available to them."
  • sndean 6y ago
    > traditional scarcity of equipment This sort of thing likely led to what one of my Russian professors was pretty proud of: That Soviet microbiologists with some bacteria, a pH meter, and some basic chemicals like sodium citrate could bang out publications, with some well-designed and elegant experiments. We Americans, on the other hand, would spend thousands of dollars on fancy machines, reagents, etc. and were less productive.
    • TheTrotters 6y ago
      “Guided by the beauty of our weapons”, I guess.
    • ausbah 6y ago
      constraints breed creativity!
• geomark 6y ago
  Here is an interesting paper [1](PDF) by a Russian mathematician who has taught mathematics in Russia, USA and Brazil. He compares the "very successful usage of word problems in Russia and contradictory, inefficient and often immature treatment of word problems in USA." [1] http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf
  • mafm 6y ago
    That's a really interesting document.
    • geomark 6y ago
      I have been using it to supplement my son's maths lessons, using some of the problems the author gives as examples and creating more in similar style.
  • bo1024 6y ago
    Wow, this is a great read! I'm on page 18 so far. It's been discussing how "word problems" are key to developing critical thinking skills, and how far behind the US seems to be in them. One point made: the idea that word problems can wait till algebra, which gives a universal method for solution, totally misses that they develop logic skills and practice with problem solving, which makes learning algebra so much easier.
    • bo1024 6y ago
      Finished it - there is uneven editing in the second half: some passages reappear in multiple places, some thoughts are unfinished. Still found it well worth the read.
    • koheripbal 6y ago
      This isn't the case anymore. US Common Core Math lessons use word problems from the first grade onward.
  • crazygringo 6y ago
• rdiddly 6y ago
  I mean, could it be as simple as "Learning math is more important to Russians than to Americans?" And before you dismiss this as simplistic, consider everything that's competing for attention with "learning math." What things are Americans either preoccupied with or beset with, that Russians esp. Soviet Russians, weren't? I'm thinking, the profit motive. Particularly as concerns textbook publishers. And parents who need to pay for healthcare and that oversized house. And textbook readers who wonder how the hell they'll ever use this to find a job.
  • jerzyt 6y ago
    Russia had brilliant mathematicians even before the October revolution, however, the Soviet Union gave another incentive to become an academic - it pretty much guaranteed a highly respected job, even if the salary was modest, but also allowed most of the academics to not get involved in politics. So in a country where you couldn't form a business, being an academic or a doctor was pretty much the best career choice.
    • yters 6y ago
      At least the engineers were too useful to the state to get purged frequently.
      • jerzyt 6y ago
        Although there were exceptions. If you got hitched to a high-visibility program, failure was considered a sabotage.
        • yters 6y ago
          So I guess the best position in a communist country is to be extremely useful and extremely obscure.
          • jerzyt 6y ago
            You could say that. I'm from Poland, so compared to Soviet Union it was communist-lite. I had a brilliant math teacher in high school. He had the reputation that if he was your math teacher you were automatically accepted at the local university. He was a legend in my town, and managed to stay under the radar of the communist regime.
• dzhiurgis 6y ago
  I'm from Lithuania. My dad had present from our relatives in Canada - basketball shoes (eventually stolen) and a calculator. That calculator pulled a lot of favours over time, he was the only one in town to have one. Dad couldn't believe you could just order anything from catalogue in 70s. Anything the world, you can buy. Such a unreal concept. He also got Beatles LP from somewhere (eventually confiscated from teachers). It's a good point the access to many basics weren't there. I've finished high school in 2006, got my first PC in 1998. Very quickly I've learned to solve math problems using graphing calculator apps. Cheated my German classes by translating from German to English using Babelfish then to Lithuanian. The only other time I ever had to do derivatives and integrals was math class at university... while studying for management degree!
• readhn 6y ago
  ...and all those hardcore math books still couldnt help avoid a society that is now run by a bunch of thugs and "thieves in law".
  • mam2 6y ago
    I'm confused whether you are talking about US or Russia right now.
• wenc 6y ago
  The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were resource-constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove the education system to favor theoretical training. I wonder if there's a trade-off to this. On one hand you produce some really elite theoretical minds (Pontryagin, Lyapunov, Kolmogorov, etc.). But the counterfactual is that it excludes those with high IQ but are more practically-oriented as well as late-bloomers who didn't take to math early but would have become reasonable applied mathematicians (I belong to this category). I guess we will never know. To draw a parallel, one of the criticisms of the French system -- where mathematics is treated as the most important arbiter of intelligence (for grandes ecoles admissions) -- is that other aptitudes are almost seen as secondary. It optimizes too much for a very narrow aptitude -- which is great for producing Fields Medalists, but underoptimizes for talent elsewhere. In my experience, while the American education system on the other hand is kind of a piece of cake from K-12, it somehow manages to catch up at the college level (more or less). At the graduate level, the differences in ability between a U.S. graduate student and a Soviet-system/Eastern European educated one is largely diminished. And it does this without over-optimizing for any particular aptitude so deep expertise is developed over a broader field in the U.S.
  • elteto 6y ago
    > The linked article points to the fact that because the Soviets were resource-constrained, theory was more accessible than equipment which drove the education system to favor theoretical training. Yes, indeed. Most people don't realize that the soviets were awful at product engineering. Their consumer-oriented products (TVs, radios, cars) were pretty terrible when compared to their western counterparts. My pet theory is that this was, in part, due to the over-emphasis in theoretical approaches instead of practical applications (that plus the lack of resources and the communist ethos against consumerism).
    • jeffreyrogers 6y ago
      But they were pretty good at engineering things like jets, helicopters, missiles, etc. I think the consume products were bad because they lacked market feedback and had trouble with supply chains, while the military products were good, arguably better than US equivalents in some cases, because of the more top-down, spec-driven nature of that work.
• c-smile 6y ago
  I was comparing my math books (from Soviet university, Physics and Applied Math) and my son's from Canadian university (CS). Huge difference to be honest. Canadian ones (same as in US I think) were more like belletristic texts written with the goal to give basics without too much thought needed by the reader. In contrast you cannot approach Soviet text math book without serious thinking effort. You need to overcome some mental barrier to get into. If you cannot do that then this is not yours - choose something else. I believe that is because of different motivations of high-school systems. University on the West gets its money directly from students so they motivated to attract and keep as many students as possible - so books are entry level to do not scare students. Barrier here is established from "paying user" side. In USSR universities were getting money from state/society as education was free so they must maintain those barriers so only those who went through were there. Barrier here is from "service provider" side.
  • pdonis 6y ago
    > University on the West gets its money directly from students Actually, many if not most of them get the majority of their funding from government research grants and investments of their endowment, not tuition.
    • roel_v 6y ago
      Doesn't matter from the pov of the university. The GP's point was that 'money source' and 'educational facility' are the same in USSR, but not in the West.
  • smohare 6y ago
    Or perhaps the “hardcore” texts are just poorly written?
    • c-smile 6y ago
      Yeah, that's what I said, "poorly written" is a criteria that can be applied to belletristic more than to science text books. Russian math books have just few words, formulas are the rest. What can be poorly written there? Kidding :)
• rb808 6y ago
  The real question should be is why are US textbooks so hard when most people never need HS math after finishing school, and lack so many other skills that are never taught.
  • jimmaswell 6y ago
    Modern Common Core seems very promising for teaching real number sense and a good foundation to think about things.
  • rimliu 6y ago
    Unless you count thinking as an important skill. It alway baffles me when I see "why don't they teach how to do taxes?". Well they do teach you how to read and hiw to do maths? How hard it is the to put 2 and 2 together?
    • mschuster91 6y ago
      Taxes and maths are two very different things. The math part of taxes usually is easy, what's complex are the countless rules around it, e.g. what can be counted as a deductible expense and what not - additionally, most rules don't even make logical sense as they were written for political reasons (i.e. to appease one or another voter/corporate interest group).
    • rb808 6y ago
      Thinking is an important skill, which is why scientific experiments, essay writing and philosophy are so important. Integrating equations, not important.
• gandalfgeek 6y ago
  It's not just math. Physics too. People from India who went through engineering entrance exams like JEE will have fond (or horrific) memories of "Problems in General Physics" by Irodov (https://archive.org/details/IrodovProblemsInGeneralPhysics/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/IrodovProblemsInGeneralPhysics/m...). Every problem in there was something to wrestle with.
  • a-ve 6y ago
    I get PTSD everytime I go to my local library and see this book in the hands of JEE aspirants.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Irodov is also a great resource when preparing for the USA Physics Olympiad. (Other, slightly easier but still good ones are Morin's books.)
    • govg 6y ago
      The International Physics Olympiad and the IITJEE have a high correlation in terms of material required as well as people who do well, it is probably the Olympiad with the highest correlation between Olympiad performance and performance in the JEE.
• lsh123 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished PhD from the same place. I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on. What separates Soviet Union (and now Russian) system is the practice of selecting kids with interest in mathematics / physics into special classes or schools for gifted kids. This government program feeds the mathematics and physics departments in the universities and allows kids who go through this program to get a very early start in mathematics. This is very similar to government sponsored sports programs with talented kids getting help with summer camps, or even all year round training schools.
  • asdfman123 6y ago
    I remember reading about the Soviet physicist Landau and I believe they made the argument that the difference between the US and the USSR is the US tried to bring every student to as high a level in math as they could, whereas the USSR was more interested in just selecting the best math students and didn't worry so much about the rest.
  • jjtheblunt 6y ago
    I suspect there's a huge variation within the US; Chicago area public schools do what you described in Russia, or did anyway. When relocating years later to California for work, locals seemed to have had access to far fewer opportunities in school. Besides math, as in the OP's observations, foreign language options seemed to only include Spanish, whereas Chicagoland had French, German, Spanish, Latin, and that included some ancient Greek. Just different opportunities, by school district.
  • m463 6y ago
    It could also bet you can't stunt your growth with a calculator. I've seen current students grasping at a calculator the first opportunity they were given.
  • credit_guy 6y ago
    My feeling is that the students in Eastern Europe (where I'm from) and very likely the Soviet Union, are very bimodal. Some are brilliant, some barely make it. If, for whatever reasons, early in your education you find yourself in the upper hump of the distribution, then it's a virtuous cycle. If not, not. In America, it feels to me ,there are plenty of programs to help the students who don't perform that well. Brilliant kids, outside of various gifted/talented programs, are left unchallenged. My son just qualified to an online math olympiad, and he told his teacher and peers about that (over a zoom meeting, obviously). The teacher was impressed, and commended him, but that's it. He will not give my son any more challenging problems, or give him any extra attention. If he does well in that olympiad, he'll congratulate my son once more, if not, he couldn't care less. When I was a kid growing up, math/physics olympiads was what I was living for. Here most teachers are not even aware they exist. Overall though, I'll go against the popular opinion, and state that I consider the school system in America (or at least in NYC) better than the one in Eastern Europe. Sure, some could point out at the ridiculous budget that schools have here ($25k per pupil in NYC [1]). But all in all, I feel my son's school experience is better than mine 35 years ago. [1] https://nypost.com/2019/05/21/nyc-spends-double-the-national-average-on-education-has-little-to-show-for-it/ https://nypost.com/2019/05/21/nyc-spends-double-the-national...
• starik36 6y ago
  Personal experience. In USSR till 16, then 11th and 12th grade in US. Yes, the books and the curriculum were way harder in the Soviet Union, but it's largely pointless. In USSR, there were 2-3 kids in the entire class who actually vaguely understood the material and the other 28 were just copying their homework. In a US high school, by contrast, you can choose to take whatever level of math you are able to grok (AP, College Prep, etc...) Given the average results, I vastly prefer the US system. USSR system was a one size fits all that didn't work well for the average pupil.
  • TheTrotters 6y ago
    Underrated point. In Poland grades often don’t matter at all (e.g. for university admission). Cheating is widespread in school (but not at final exams after high school). Meanwhile in US your high school grades matter for university admission etc. And, yes, it is often possible for students to complete these harder classes without much to show for it.
• Jugurtha 6y ago
  I stand by my answer[0] to that question. [0]: https://qr.ae/pNrgmY https://qr.ae/pNrgmY
  • mesaframe 6y ago
    Can you share some examples backing your claims? For both US, and Russian books.
  • anilakar 6y ago
    Heck, that was common knowledge some fifteen years ago during my freshman year. I personally never bought those American coursebooks. For the price of one brick, I could pretty much buy all the required self-study material printed form. After my sophomore year, they did away with the university press anyway and told the professors to just make their materials available in electronic form. Besides, when you're in uni, you're learning to study, not learning to be hand-held.
• Koshkin 6y ago
  Most American grad level math textbooks are as hardcore as it gets; undergrad, not so much, especially compared to such introductory texts as, say, Beginner's Course in Topology: Geometric Chapters by Rokhlin et al. which, I’d say, is extreme in its hard-coreness. (A popular text by Munkres, by comparison, is a children’s book.)
• nine_zeros 6y ago
  My wife’s 12 yr old niece lives in India. Every time I see her, she’s studying all day. I happened to look at her math books. They had hundreds or thousands of word problems in one year’s cheap textbook. And she had solved ALL of them TWICE over within 8 months. It was unbelievable. I haven’t seen anything quite like this in America.
• yters 6y ago
  I think it comes down to communism. According to Marx's book "The Machine" the end game of communism is essentially an omnibenevolent AI. Marx thought eventually all forms of labor would be mechanised into a colossal machine that would run the world. Thus, the whole point of education is to train the geniuses in math, science, and technology in order to bring about this machine god. That's, in my opinion, why there is such a huge emphasis on those subjects in the Soviet system. All the other subjects are full of questions and speculation, and in general seem useless from that perspective once you believe you've reduced the aspirations of the humanities' longing for justice and truth to an engineering problem to solve.
  • TimTheTinker 6y ago
    That’s fascinating... and somewhat terrifying. Because it seems clear to me that it won’t require communism or totalitarianism to achieve that kind of endgame (or at least, to get really close to it). Perhaps the communist/totalitarian/power-hungry nations of the world are sitting back and waiting for us in western nations to build such a system (think AWS, but 30 years from now). All they have to do is get complete control of it by one method or another, and then they’ve won. One would think a proper national defense-in-depth mindset dictates carefully considering and planning for such a future.
    • yters 6y ago
      Perhaps that's the end goal for all the hot tech buzzwords: - cloud - internet of things - artificial intelligence
    • yters 6y ago
      Here's the cite: http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf http://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf "once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages"
• sunnyujjawal 6y ago
  you are operating within the scope of a single country, eliminating all cases within that country would not be a stopping rule https://timenational.com/ https://timenational.com/
• moscow_math 6y ago
  Would someone mind providing texts that particularly exemplify the Soviet style?
• totorovirus 6y ago
  In my high school year in international school(in germany) I've seen many students from diverse backgrounds. I could see balanced number of students taught from their own origin: US, asian or international school itself. One thing I remember until now is that students from US kept using the phrase 'plug-it-in' whenever they substitute values into quadratic formula. Overusing that term made me laugh about their attitude towards math because it felt as if they didn't really care what's inside that magic formula that pops the answer out. It felt so 'american' because I felt the same attitude when they treat computer programs: 'I don't give a shit about what's going on. Some smart asian kid will make me a magic machine that I just need to plug in the numbers and prints the answer, while I focus on making varsity football team next year.' You can downvote me for my racism though. All excuse I can make is that they also laughed when I told them how their attitude towards math sounded like.
  • cmeacham98 6y ago
    You could have expressed this same opinion, and in a stronger way, by not including the racism and racial stereotypes.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    "Plug-it-in" is simply jargon for what would more properly be called substitution and reduction. One would use the exact same sort of reasoning when doing "proper" math proofs, so I think your attitude might be a bit misguided - there's no "magic" involved.
    • totorovirus 6y ago
      yes but I've already seen the attitude among american students who treat plug-it-in equivalent to plug-in devices xD
  • gitgudnubs 6y ago
    So much racism for treating functions as black boxes. That's what you're supposed to do: treat functions as black boxes, not express casual racism on hacker news.
• Koshkin 6y ago
  It may be just that Russian style of teaching is more conservative and preserved the way teaching was done in the 1800s.
  • konart 6y ago
    > teaching was done in the 1800s. Teaching whom? Peasants? Soviet system was build as an attempt to provide schooling for every one, what kind of schooling of 1800 you are even talking about?
    • p_l 6y ago
      Advanced schooling used to be for the elites. With the revolutions, the system was simply expanded, not created from scratch anew. So you would have the methods used to teach the elites be the foundations of the new system.
• aks_tldr 6y ago
  Ah mir publications, One of my favorite book during school was elementary mathematics by them. https://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Mathematics-G-Dorofeev/dp/8123908423 https://www.amazon.com/Elementary-Mathematics-G-Dorofeev/dp/...
• Hard_Space 6y ago
  I moved to Romania three years ago, and was surprised to find the same kind of specialist/vocational high school paths have been in use a long time in this country. Once you hit teen years you might find yourself, if you worked hard enough, in one of the more prestigious specialized high school institutions for one of many subjects, such as architecture, medicine, physics or the arts. It seemed to me a huge pressure to put on such young shoulders, to commit to a career path so early, but that's the aptitude-based system that dominated under communism. Since the schools are so prestigious, much of that system still remains.
• mygo 6y ago
  Is following along and learning / practicing math directly from a textbook still the most effective way to learn math? Now that we have devices in our pockets and on our desktops with more and more capabilities that have educational use cases such as interactivity and AR, how would a calculus lesson be made in 2020? Could we just go down the street, aim our devices at cars passing by, or cars speeding up from a stop sign, and see how speed, acceleration, and position relate to each other in real-time? Or aim it at a pool table, bounce a cue ball off another ball and see how vector summation can work in real life? Or input the weight of a cue ball, the type of surface (felt?) and then see how the applied force can be estimated based on how fast the cue ball moves when you hit it? Interactive bits like this as examples and practice mixed in with the text?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    I think that's a great way to get an intuitive understanding of the concepts, as an introduction to the subject, but at some point you really do have to sit down with numbers and equations and learn the theory behind it all and apply it to examples that aren't constrained by the reality you can physically experience in a classroom.
    • mygo 6y ago
      You would certainly have to sit down with numbers and equations, but that still doesn’t automatically imply that a textbook is the best way. You can derive numbers and equations via an app for example. My question is this: if you always had the textbook’s author, who is an expert instructor with decades of teaching experience instantly available, in person, whenever you want a lesson or to be reminded of an equation or want to learn more about a subject, at no harm to him and his well-being: under which situations would you opt for the textbook? To me it feels like a textbook is one way to store and transfer and spread knowledge, but is it automatically the best way to ever do so? Or is the textbook simply one technology, and we are still searching for the best way to teach as many people as possible with the resources and technologies at our disposal?
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  I don't know about the Soviets, but American books always seem to take longer to say less than other countries texts. I think it's a volume thing: Americans see 400 pages and think it must be twice the product of a 200 page alternative...
  • widforss 6y ago
    My father always told me that American textbook authors got paid by the page. That's probably not true, but it certainly feels that way when reading them.
• meritocracy66 6y ago
  Because Soviet math textbooks target a different audience: those kids who really enjoy math and derive pleasure in a bit of complexity (think Sheldon Cooper from BBT). You can call them elitist. Nobody cares about the other kids. US textbooks, on the other hand, are targeted towards more general audience--the average student. That doesn't make them bad, just different.
• amoorthy 6y ago
  My son started in the Russian School of Math - a pretty popular after-school program in many US cities. What is fascinating is the core theory that algebra can be grasped by children as young as 6. And there seems to be some truth to this given my son's experience. One random shout-out: I think if more of us learned math from folks like 3 Blue 1 Brown we would love it enough to explore it more. I don't know if I'm smart enough to have become a master mathematician but I find myself falling in love with math with every video he puts out.
• hliyan 6y ago
  > because of the traditional scarcity of equipment, Russian students and scientists had to think rather than experiment This heavily resonated with me. Early in my career (late 90's - early 00's), I had to develop the skill of dry running (basically running a given block of code with given inputs in my head and predicting the outcomes) because of scarcity. I was in a domain where I had to build 100,000+ lines of C++ into a single executable, manually deploy to a remote Solaris machine and wait for up to 5 minutes for system re-initialization before I could run a simple test. Needless to say, we learned to predict what our code does as we wrote it. The idea of unit tests re-running automatically as you write new code in the IDE would have been dismissed as an unattainable heaven (or maybe even considered downright satanic).
• 8589934591 6y ago
  Anyone have any links for recommended textbooks? It'd be nice to have a sort of roadmap for a self learner. Especially recommended soviet textbooks.
• PeterStuer 6y ago
  We had a very famous MIT professor on a 6 month sabbatical at our lab in the early 90's. He remarked on the difference between US and our institution in Belgium being that here you can just assume undergrad students would be fluent in basic math subjects, whereas in the US (in this case MIT) you would have to explain even very basic math. Now 3 decades later we are also at a US level as math has in general been completely de-emphasized at all levels of education. As for textbooks, at the time EU ones were pretty clean, mostly definitions, axioms, proofs and conjectures, plots etc, layed out in simple black on white, whereas US textbooks were extremely wordy, full of colour and irrelevant photos blasting away at your senses. Sadly this seems to be the style that commercially won, but I doubt very much it is beneficial to the student.
  • Dahoon 6y ago
    The whole western world is copying all the mistakes from the US.
  • ausbah 6y ago
    I don't think just plopping all the subject material in front of a student and expecting everyone to immediately "get it". Some people may have the intuition to read a group of definitions or a proof and suddenly understand the higher level concepts gluing everything together, but that certainly doesn't work for everyone. Anecdotally, having a textbook that explains a concept via examples without jargon and informative pictures, then throwing all the definitions and proofs at me has been much more helpful to my understanding in multiple subject areas. I'd also throw "extremely wordy passages" in there as well because having something repeated & reframed multiple times has help me understand something from multiple perspectives - and remind me of a previous definition at a crucial point in the text.
• tapatio 6y ago
  In Soviet Russia, you teach textbook.
• rawoke083600 6y ago
  First thing that comes to mind when reading this headline the "Ivan Drakov Meme" with "If he fails, he fails" :D
• nubero 6y ago
  Funny… My father worked in Protvino in the early 70s for a CERN Project…
• grabball 6y ago
  I'm the only one who hates quora.com?
• LaserToy 6y ago
  Because Spartaaaaa. But honestly, I always thought it is because whoever wrote them didn’t care to make them easier as they were not competing for the student. But yep, they are total hardcore.
• tracker1 6y ago
  For that matter, look at say a 4th or 5th grade English textbook from the U.S. pre-1970 compared to even High School book today.
• usgroup 6y ago
  I feel lots of people have made the point that over time the emphasis on maths has been reduced such that education would be more useful to more people. I.e structuring the maths syllabus such that it would select for the maths super stars does a poor job of giving the run of the mill student much value from their maths education. I do grad level maths every day but I’ve never stopped being a reluctant mathematician. Sometimes the maths of the problem is insightful and interesting but most of the time what I’m doing is battling to express/validate an intuition in a formal language. I think that emphasis on maths as a language for the exact representation of your thoughts is maybe what the modern curriculum is up to, as opposed to the emphasis of maths as the language of your thoughts. Just the same way that you might write code to express designs; I think it’d be weird to think in code although certainly some (maybe even the best) do think about software in something closer to code than box diagrams.
• oarabbus_ 6y ago
  How do Soviet high school math/physics texts compare to those of China, and India?
  • govg 6y ago
    I can't speak for China, but in India there has not been a historically large amount of attention paid to writing textbooks in mathematics and physics. During high school, the students who seek challenging problems often fall back to Russian text books, especially in physics. More recently there has been a push by some Indian authors, so you will find some challenging texts by Indian authors, but still nowhere close to say Krotov or Irodov for physics.
• Tade0 6y ago
  My friend went to one of the best high schools in my country (Poland), where students would, on their own accord, practice using old Soviet math textbooks. I got my hands on one of them where the task stated was usually something short, like: "доказать тождество", followed by a set of rather insane(at least for a highschooler) equations. That bit about a dearth of equipment is true in most eastern block countries by the way. Case in point: the other day I asked my younger cousin, who's currently doing his master's, if they still use those multimeters with nixie tube displays like I did ten years ago. They do.
• rq1 6y ago
  I still have my father’s MIR books and they seemed to me really practical and pragmatic. Especially the Smirnov (iirc) ones about differential calculus, where he introduces it with a physics quantification problem. You could then imagine objects moving around... etc. Later on he introduces the formal definitions... informally (like “we discussed this and that, let’s call this concept <concept> and if you think about it if <assumption> then <theorem>“). It’s like a piece of literature or a correspondance. Compared to that, Bourbakis feel like being lost in a desert without anything to drink nor eat but dry biscuits.
• DeathArrow 6y ago
  I grew up in a former eastern block country. There are many reasons for this: In USSR and other communist countries, there was a pressure towards having more scientists, engineers and highly trained specialists. To achieve this, they had to foster excellence. US educational system is optimized for inclusion, diversity and money making. This means technical and scientific subjects are watered down so nobody is left behind. USSR and eastern block educational systems were built to cater to the most gifted students and produce scientific excellence. That is also true for some parts of Europe today, China, India and South Korea and maybe some other asian countries. There was also a lack of distractions so it was easier for the kids in schools and students in universities to concentrate on learning. In general, kids were expected to do a lot of homework each day and during vacations - I remember doing tens of math exercises each day and hundreds in vacation. There were special classes in high school for more talented kids - where they got to do more math, physics, chemistry than their peers. Those classes had the best teachers. Best kids at math or other sciences had supplementary training, they stayed after hours and learned more advanced concepts often with University teachers. The school books in secondary schools and high schools weren't authored by educators but by best scientist in their fields. Learning programs were unique and developed also by the best in their fields, not by educators. Teachers followed very rigorous training in universities, so they were actually skilled in the field they taught. Everything builds over notions taught in previous years. There's no shortcut, no constant remembering of elementary notions. Everything was taught with proofs, in a logical manner. There was no "magic". No teacher said "this thing works this way, you have to trust me on this". Instead, all things were proofed and the students had to learn all the "whys" along with the "hows". If you were a high school student and forgot one more advanced integration or derivation formula, there's no problem in deducting it from more basic theory. One could enroll in a technical Faculty at University only after a series of very difficult exams. Sometimes you had to fight with 30 - 40 others for a place. Once students reached higher education, the mediocre were weed out, leaving University teacher concetrating on teaching most advanced concepts to the kind of people whou could grasp them and were interested. Since any kind of education was free, and in many cases state provided free food and housing and many scholarship for many university students and some high school students, the state wanted to otimized their returns. That meant getting the most highly trained specialists they could for the resources they used in education. Students were also motivated to learn, because a job as a scientist or engineer was deemed a much better career than working long shifts in cold factories. To conclude: the communist regime had to compete with the West somehow, and in that competition they had to make learning a very competitive space. US educational system lives from the money payd by students, or by funding based on the number of students, so on one hand it has to attract more and more students so it earns more money. US educational system is more and more impacted by ideology, and scientific education is more and more watered down, even at the best universities.[1] For now, that impact on education is solved by bringing lots of people educated elsewhere. It will probably work this way as long as US has better standard of living. I think it is not a safe bet to rely in the long term, and since standard of living will constantly improve in other countries, US has to better its scientific and technical education, not worsen it. [1] https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harming-sciences-15826.html https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-identity-politics-harm...
• qaq 6y ago
  It's not just textbooks. The whole approach was different. You would be regularly called upon in class to do a problem on the blackboard. You would be graded on the spot publicly. There was no participation trophy type stuff. Teacher could easily make fun of you for not knowing something etc.
  • b3kart 6y ago
    Sounds like a recipe for producing a handful of brilliant scientists and a generation of traumatised students.
    • qaq 6y ago
      Could be or might be just people with better adaptation to tough env. Someone needs to do a study on this :)
• eli555 6y ago
  I had a student from the Soviet Union in my class. He said they had no funding for all the nice things we had in chemistry class. But that the difference was that he had never seen so many people unwilling to learn anything, as he had noted of American students.
• dirtnugget 6y ago
  I had an exchange year during High School where I moved from Germany to Florida for a year and attended a public school. I hate to say this but to me the classes were laughably easy. While I was a 10th grader in Germany I could have easily graduated there. I do however favour the US system of individual classes where you could advance in e.g. Mathematics but if you had trouble with language you could take a less-intensive course. This doesn't work in Germany. You either advance with all subjects at once or you don't. One of the most stupid things that I have witnessed. In our 11th/12th grade we would have a huge difference between grades. About 20% of people were getting straight A's while over a third struggled to even pass. Barely anyone in the mid-range. Terrible system which makes it really really hard for teachers to teach a class.
  • brummm 6y ago
    The big difference is also that German high school students are split into three different schools with the top school (Gymnasium) being much harder than US high schools. In US high schools, students are not split and obviously they can't advance as fast.
  • ThreeFx 6y ago
    You have a form of in Germany that in most of the states with the "Leistungskurse" or the "Profilklassen". I'd argue that its extremely important to _not_ be able to drop courses since it contributes to a well-rounded education, something the US sorely lacks.
    • dirtnugget 6y ago
      Yeah but this system is taking a huge toll on the teachers. Our maths teacher had to basically give two different courses within one class, because the gap was so big.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• tarun_anand 6y ago
  This is a question close to my heart. I was a huge fan of Russian Math and Science books and I used them to study for an entrance exam to IIT (its more difficult to get into IIT than Harvard) and came out in top 100 in the country. But, inspite of coming out at the top of the exam, I found Russian maths books very interesting and sometimes very difficult to master. This coming from a country full of brilliant mathematicians. Russian math books are not only hardcore compared to US - they are hardcore compared to India also!! One particular example is V. A. Krechmar. https://www.amazon.in/Problem-Book-Algebra-V-Krechmar/dp/9351448320 https://www.amazon.in/Problem-Book-Algebra-V-Krechmar/dp/935... If you consider yourself good in maths, try solving the problems from this book! There is simply no comparison of Soviet Math Books with the rest of the world. US is so far behind that this comparison is not apt. The closest is Indian Math books or books from Cambridge like S. L. Loney.
  • ken47 6y ago
    "its more difficult to get into IIT than Harvard" By what metric? I doubt that everyone who got into IIT could get into Harvard. But I may be a bit biased because I work with some IIT graduates who are a bit underwhelming relative to the reputation of their alma mater.
    • govg 6y ago
      It's a hard comparison since Harvard and the IITs have different admission processes. Admissions to the IITs happen via a single exam, which is held at the end of 12 years of school education and is conducted over a few hours consisting of upper level physics, chemistry and mathematics. Harvard meanwhile has a lot more in terms of admission criteria, with essays, SAT scores and other things taken into consideration. The easiest way to justify OPs stance is to compare the admitted / applied ratio for both schools, owing to the sheer number of people taking the IITJEE and the relatively low number of seats available (around 10k), the success ratio is lower than Harvard.
      • ken47 6y ago
        I agree - that could be the closest to a sound argument, but it's a very superficial one. Someone who claims to be highly intelligent by virtue of their alma mater should know better than to advance such an argument to an educated audience.
• econcon 6y ago
  Well I went to IIT and our education system is more like Soviet Style education, heck we used the same books for competition prep. I aced every class always stood first in my class till class 10th and after that my performance dropped till I realized that "I am not supposed to care about understanding a concept in its entirety and solve problem based on only things I've learned however limiting it was". It was first unsettling to me because in earlier classes I always went into depth and tried building my understanding of a subject from ground up but in class 11th, there was no time for all that. I did what everyone does, I basically figured out how to solve problems based on pattern recognition, this literally required no understanding or even how things for together but remembering few rules and forumla and their order, and there you go - I cleared IIT just like that, no coaching or help required. This literally killed all my love for subjects and it became a "game" to solve problems and acquire points. So I stopped bothering with deeper understanding all together and began having life as in hanging out with friends and girlfriend and only coming back to study when I am in mood to game the system again. I never enjoyed this kind of labor, slow placed exploration made bigger impact on my mind and I've forgotten most of the things I learned in competition mode. Thing is those students who feel like they can't build concepts in air without solid roots, they are going to suffer in Soviet Style education.
  • alimw 6y ago
    I'm not sure this is specific to any particular school of mathematical education. There is bound to come a point at which you cannot understand everything and have to start winging it. If you can cope with that, that's good, you are prepared psychologically for research mathematics. And just having learned the patterns will hold you in good stead. But if (as I did) you find the whole thing an insult to your pride then you are only preparing yourself for failure.
    • govg 6y ago
      India (and a few other places) face this issue to a larger extent, I feel. When the judgement of your education comes via one single competitive exam, you tend to maximize that reward. In the Indian education system (and to similar extent afaik in china, south Korea and Japan), having nationwide tests that are the only factor for university admissions in math and science forces everyone competing to solve for performance in the exam. And it is far easier to do this by learning how to solve problems than by learning the material then using that knowledge to solve problems.
• Havoc 6y ago
  The teachers too. We had one that could work out trig stuff in her head to a fair amount of decimals.
• inglor 6y ago
  We have lots of Soviet teachers in Israel, they always said "it's better to solve something in 15 ways than solve 15 things the same way" and that resonated. To be fair though, that approach is omnipresent in the math faculty in the Hebrew University - so it was not unique to the Soviet paradigm but it was interesting to see it in High School. There is also a genuine sense of "let's try to do this!" that's very common in computer science but is more common in "soviet" math than "regular Israeli" math. The most important distinction IMO was that these teachers were not _afraid_ of Math and could discuss higher level non-high-school concepts typically. Having a teacher that loves the subject is important.
• nafey 6y ago
  This a gem of a line: "Coding up a simulation and having a computer torture it until it confessed the results you wanted certainly takes talent, but it is arguably a different kind of talent than thinking deeply about the problem itself."
• readwind 6y ago
  What a mountain of USSR and eastern-europe people there are in this thread; so refreshing; this is great.
• MisterTea 6y ago
  I have a feeling that TV/media really did play a huge role in the decline of intellectualism in the western world. The USA loves its TV, hollywood and celebrities. It's been reinforced throughout the culture and it makes a lot of people very very wealthy. The more time you spend watching tv the more money they make. Though here's the crux for them, educated people think more and do more so they don't make good customers. So fill the TV with anti intellectualism. Then toss it the political usefulness of a mindless medium and you have a dangerous conduit so to speak. A friend grew up in a household where his mother forbade TV and video games. During this covid-19 lockdown, instead of mindlessly watching TV like everyone else appears to be doing, he built a deck and is rebuilding his garage among other projects. Every other friend I talk to is sitting around drunk, high or watching TV. Few do some projects but it's mostly TV show chatter in the chat apps. Personally I don't hate TV and I have netflix. Though I only really watch it in spates and when it is on, I am on my laptop or doodling in my notebooks. It's more for background noise than content. Though of course there are some times when I'm tired and just want to sit and watch an episode of a show.
  • Shivetya 6y ago
    Politics played a bigger role. Simply put they had to aim for lowest common denominator when setting standards else claims of discrimination would pile on. Many school systems went so far as to either modify grading systems to prevent embarrassment or celebration of achievement. Schools types which attempt to provide a more specialized learn curriculum are regularly demonized for one reason or another. If you want the best education then the word fairness needs to be applied properly. Fairness is insuring all students are offered the opportunity to learn and receive an education while accepting there are many who can learn more and should be offered the opportunity to do so even if that includes elevating them among their peers. Educational achievement should be held in higher esteem that sports yet for some odd reason we do not consider fairness is sports an issue where some kids cannot compete because of ability yet in learning we do.
    • MisterTea 6y ago
      Schooling has indeed been dumbed down but that as happened in the more recent decades. TV/media manipulation has been at work slowly getting our intellectual capacity for decades, since WW2. I even will go as far as to say it was a direct result of WW2. Cant have kids growing up to be commies. Best have little Susie and Joey sit and watch wholesome american tv reinforcing traditional american values of imperialism, idealism, consumerism and obedience to authority.
• bronlund 6y ago
  Why do you think? ;)
• INTPenis 6y ago
  I'm a Swede who returned to their native Croatia in the late 90s and early 2000s and found that kids were learning maths on a much more advanced level than we were in Sweden. I've throughout my life learned that this goes for most of eastern europe. I can't explain why. If it's a more demanding education or if they have some sort of genetic/environmental predisposition for maths. But the phenomenon has been pretty consistent in my experience with people from Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine and the balkans. One memory that stuck with me was how the village children would come back from their last day at school, beginning of summer, and show off their report cards. Dozens of happy kids walking along a dirt road with their report cards in hand, ready to show them off to any adult that might give them a few Kuna or candy for the effort. I was shocked, having been raised in Sweden.
• rpiguy 6y ago
  The classic answer to this question is that "math was cheap." The Soviet Union was comparatively poor to the United States, so you create advantages where you can for the least investment. Math and national security are closely linked, aerodynamics, radio communication/RADAR, encryptions, etc. investment in rigor payed them dividends.
• simplegeek 6y ago
  Who are some of the famous Russian authors for high school maths? Sorry about going on a tangent but looking for good books for my kid. Thanks!
• OJFord 6y ago
  All the answers (and discussion here) seems to take the title question as fact. My initial reaction was - and I should say at this point I'm neither from nor live in either country, and have no national pride or whatever to be wounded by who has the harder-core textbooks - are they actually? Or do they just cover different material, that the US curriculum happens to get to later? It's a pity Quora doesn't have a question 'body', like StackExchange does for example, such that the asker could've given an example.
• cafard 6y ago
  A neighbor in Washington, DC, sent her son for tutoring at the so-named Russian School of Mathematics here.