13 ms·

Math from Three to Seven

345 points by background 2y ago

0xdde 2y ago
The author raises an interesting question as to how the Soviets produced so much scientific talent, but his discussion of math circles strikes me as more of a tangent than a convincing answer. Were these math circles really so widespread, and were they a big part of producing mathematical and scientific question? He doesn't address this. However, the book he is reviewing is available online [1] and I see from skimming it that Zvonkin says only one of his students ultimately chose math as a profession. My hunch is that the structure of the formal education system in the USSR played a larger role. [1] https://sites.icmc.usp.br/sasha_a/zvonkin-e.pdf https://sites.icmc.usp.br/sasha_a/zvonkin-e.pdf
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - lupire 2y ago
    They invented space ships, for one thing. Russian was a scientific power in the 19th Century before Soviet Union, and continued during the Soviet era. The west had limited access to it, due to the Cold War. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Ru...
    - avmich 2y ago
      Soviet Union wasn't called a superpower for nothing. USSR had many world class achievements in scientific and applied areas, and some organizational achievements in social and manufacturing areas. There are examples and counterexamples, but the result is what we have, and while at some areas ex-Soviets were seen as backwards people in early 1990-s, in some others they really brought some positive advancements to the West - or First World - when the borders became open.
      - m_mueller 2y ago
        Case in point: The reason why the US heavily relied on Soviet rocket engines for their launches for ~15 years (before SpaceX dominance) was because they were simply more advanced and cost effective. Material science apparently was a step above - Soviet scientists were able to create an alloy for use in oxygen-rich engines which was unbelievable to Western counterparts till they visited and had it demonstrated.
        avmich 2y ago
        This is one example, and there could be many - both where USSR had an edge and where it was behind. I believe here we want to have the overall picture - and that picture was that there actually were some novelties which were interesting on the West, even though in overall quality of life and some associated parameters USSR was notably losing. Or, saying it from another end, USSR wasn't advanced enough to avoid dissolution after - not necessarily caused by - the Cold war, even though it had some achievements unavailable on the West.
        m_mueller 2y ago
        Yes, that was what I also wanted to point out here. As in, the set of novelties Soviets had over the West was at least non-zero. And that rocketry happened to be one may be surprising to some of those less informed about space technology.
    - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
      Lol what
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    The Soviets produced a lot of outstanding mathematicians. It's remarkable in absolute terms and it's even more remarkable considering that Soviet education was generally anti-science for much of its existence (e.g. see [0]). IIRC Stalin eventually left a group of mathematicians and physicists alone because it was clear that if they were suppressed the Soviet Union couldn't win wars or plan the economy. My initial hypothesis would be that creating this kind of playground in the otherwise dismal intellectual atmosphere, combined with the ability to select the best people from all over the empire, and the urgency and funding that came with the wars and cold war, played a major role in their ability to do important work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the_S...
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    If you study much of 20th century mathematics and physics, you'll certainly find Soviet mathematicians showing up everywhere. Control theory, probability, nonlinear differential equations, etc. Just from the names of theorems alone, it's pretty hard to miss.
  - komali2 2y ago
    Quantify in my opinion requires qualify because, how many is "a lot?" But broad strokes, the USSR was an intellectual powerhouse. Add as many "in spite of"'s as you like, but in my opinion the "a lot" target is achieved. You mention science and I'll get to that, but I want to first target what I feel is a general misconception of the Soviet Union as like, a bleak concrete-ridden, muddy backwater of labor camps (it kinda was of course) with nothing to contribute to the world. Post revolutionary periods always produce fantastic art, literature, and social experiments. See post-revolutionary American religious scene for an example. In the Soviet Union, there's a clumping of great literature around 1917. Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_literature#Early_post-Revolutionary_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_literature#Early_post-... > The Imaginists were post-Revolution poetic movement, similar to English-language Imagists, that created poetry based on sequences of arresting and uncommon images. The major figures include Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Marienhof, and Rurik Ivnev.[65] Another important movement was the Oberiu (1927–1930s), which included the most famous Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934), Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) and Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903–1958).[66][67] Other famous authors experimenting with language included the novelists Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938), Yuri Olesha (1899–1960), Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) and Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938), the short-story writers Isaak Babel (1894–1940) and Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958). Sorry for the big copy paste, but, there's just so many of them, and to literature nerds, what they did was "groundbreaking." I know it sounds silly but let us literature nerds have our thing. Then there's a bunch of fun leftist / communist poetry, from Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Tikhonov (the "Could nails from such people be fashioned" guy). And on and on. Art had some interesting characters as well, "in spite of" the Socialist Realism thing. Isaak Brodsky, for example. Re: science, as someone else linked, efforts were hampered slightly by the repression of science that was perceived as in opposition to dialectical materialism, but in general the Soviet Union seemed very determined to create a lot of engineers. You have Fields medal winners: Grigory Margulis (interestingly he suffered from the Soviet antisemitism mentioned in this article), Vladimir Drinfeld, and Sergei Novikov. And you have nobel prize winners such as Nikolay Semenov, Nikolay Basov + Alexander Prokhorov, Pavel Cherenkov (the Cherenkov radiation guy) + Ilya Frank + Igor Tamm, Leonid Kantorovich (basically invented linear programming), Pyotr Kapitsa, and Lev Landau. Then there's the obvious such as the fact that the Soviets were first to put a satellite in orbit, first to put a human in orbit (arguably far more useful than putting a human on the moon, though putting a human on the moon is probably more inspiring). What is interesting is how during the time these may not be "contributions to science" due to the USA and the Soviet Union often not sharing advancements in science with eachother because of the Cold War. Imagine if the two nations had been cooperating with eachother. Then again maybe there wouldn't have been a "Space Race."
- lupire 2y ago
  It's all part and parcel of a deeply mathematical culture. "Math as a profession" is a limited subset of "professions that rely heavily on math", despite what some mathematicians might say.
- ccppurcell 2y ago
  And that one was his own son, if memory serves. Genetics and family culture may play a big role.
  - nicolas_t 2y ago
    Another girl, not his daughter, from the girl's circle also became a mathematician (whereas the daughter is a professor of film studies). So, yes, genetic, family culture (most of the parents of the kids from the math circles were teachers or academics), interests...
- atemerev 2y ago
  The real answer is that we (I speak as a Russian) didn’t have such advanced computers in the USSR. What was routinely solved numerically in the US, had to be painstakingly traced analytically, and new methods had to be developed for such approaches, and mathematical education had to be boosted so enough people could work in the field (mostly developing new weapons, sadly).
bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
[flagged]
lovegrenoble 2y ago
The USSR was indeed the most reading country in the world. Soviet citizens spent approx. 11 hours a week reading books, newspapers and journals on average, which was twice more as the British, North Americans and French people did. It was the findings of the world study of 1966.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
  Not a good metric for producing scientific talent, and it doesn't distinguish reading fiction from actually educating yourself. For the purposes of producing scientific talent, reading fiction helps you as much as watching TV.
  - philosopher1234 2y ago
    I don’t know any definition of actually educating yourself that would exclude reading fiction. And why are you focused on the purpose of producing scientific talent?
    - shepherdjerred 2y ago
      The article is trying to explain why the Soviets were so good at keeping up with the US in science/math
      - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
        Right... tell me you didn't read the article, am I right. That's why I didn't bother replying. I often feel the impulse to reply to "show everyone that this guy is talking nonsense" but if that's obvious other people will see it too, so I say nothing.
  - 12345hn6789 2y ago
    This is an incredibly pessimistic view. Do you have any sources to these claims?
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
lupire 2y ago
6 years ago and 10 years ago, with a few comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Math+from+Three+to+Seven https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Math+from+Three+to+Seven This book and the culture it come from are so influential, that many people who did "enrichment" have already been exposed to many of the activities in the book. Most famous may be the Scratch JR / code.org introductory computer programming, but with pencil and paper.
- dang 2y ago
  Ah good find. Macroexpanded: Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17018583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17018583 - May 2018 (20 comments) Math from Three to Seven: Chapters One and Three [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811334 - Dec 2014 (21 comments)
bee_rider 2y ago
I think this must be a very stupid question, but I’ll ask it anyway. I always thought the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population wise, and really did punch above their weight. But Soviet Union census of 1970 lists 241,720,134 people, while the US census of 1970 lists 203,392,031 people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Soviet_census https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Soviet_census https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_United_States_census https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_United_States_census Is this statistic somehow not representative? If so, what’s up with that? If not, is the belief that the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population widespread and wrong? If it is widespread and wrong, where’s it come from? (Although, I must admit the possibility that it isn’t widespread, and was just unusually wrong. In which case the answer is just that I’m unusually bad at geopolitics, which would not be surprising at all).
- aklemm 2y ago
  Probably just conflating Soviet Union with Russia, which does have a smaller population. The Soviet Union encompassed so many more countries.
- dankwizard 2y ago
  I don't think anybody except you thought it was smaller. Why are you suggesting theres a widespread misconception instead of the more likely alternative - you made a mistake?
  - johnfn 2y ago
    The article strongly implies this. > These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking.
    - qup 2y ago
      Also > Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?
tightbookkeeper 2y ago
Every study which examines different populations across the world and expects them to be identical will be confused. If every cultural group was equally interested in math, that would be shocking.
myth_drannon 2y ago
I have this book, it's a fun read but difficult to replicate on your own. Tried on my children but it's hard work and I'm not a mathematician like the author and the society is different.
com2kid 2y ago
From the book being reviewed: > All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. And in this, Eastern Europeans had a clear superiority, a cultural advantage. They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely. IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field. I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.
- dinobones 2y ago
  Good example of passion from early bell Labs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 Other examples I can think of (from my Gen Z experience, growing up in SoCal): - Elementary school: Making custom action replay codes, hacking game saves with programs, CheatEngine/memory/hex editor and following YouTube tutorials, Javascript "document.contentEditable=true" hack and changing stuff on websites, pressing F12 and changing random javascript code until something interesting happens or breaks. - Middle school: making sites on Weebly/freewebs, embedding chats and flash games on them, sharing them during computer class - High school: Making PHP sites/vbulliten/Newgrounds/flash games, later iOS apps I wasn't the only one doing these things. There were always like 3 other kids like me in any classroom that would do the same things. Most of us ended up becoming passionate SWEs, besides one that became an accountant.
- Onavo 2y ago
  > They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely. Nonsense, sounds like post-hoc rationalization. Maybe talk to some actual Slavic people. Sure the Russians had "math clubs" and "chess clubs" but it wasn't as if the US didn't have RadioShack and garage/ham culture. Talk to some of the older generations that still remember the Berlin Wall and you might also understand why so many women from the ex USSR states are in STEM while it's the opposite in the West. TL;dr: STEM was a quick way to prosperity, the eastern bloc countries were poor, and engineers are useful even in a communist regime. They studied math because there wasn't much else they couldn't have done.
svat 2y ago
When my kid was three I encountered this lovely book and thought I'd read it to attempt to replicate something like it (despite all the warnings that it's a journal and not a guide); unfortunately I never got around to finishing the book (nothing against the book, just got distracted) and now the kid's already past seven :) But what little I read was delightful; thanks for posting this summary!
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  I have a similar experience. The book skips the first 20 weeks. Many of the activities require materials and I could have benefited from a more prescriptive curriculum. Some other math circle curricula are not as inspiring but are much easier to follow.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Yep, I thought the idea seemed cool, but I couldn't figure out how to execute it.
    - nicolas_t 2y ago
      A couple of other books that I think are useful and easier to execute than Zvonkin's books are the books by Christopher Danielson. Which One Doesn't Belong? is great to play with a child and Talking Math with Your Kids has some good ideas (way too short though)
  - nicolas_t 2y ago
    The book skips the first 20 weeks for the boys but covers those activities for the girls (around the end of the book). So I'd suggest reading the girl circle and then coming back to the boys circle... I've absolutely loved that book and I've been trying to incorporate some of the ideas in games with my son. That said, do keep in mind that despite being from 3 to 7, his son is actually 3 years old and 10 months when he started (and I think the same for the daughter, I forgot). Personally, I've noticed that my just turned 3 years old son is not developmentally ready for a lot of the activities yet (but he's been surprisingly good at other activities), so I do think that you need to adapt depending on the children you try this on.
Illniyar 2y ago
Regarding Soviet prowess, I always considered the fact that going to higher education considerably shortened and made easier your military draft term to be a main factor. Everyone who could went to university, because why wouldn't you? This incentive pressure and selection bias we're probably insane.
- generationP 2y ago
  That and even better: it opened the doors towards a lot of the better jobs, both in terms of working conditions and offering some amount of breathing room. Education was a more significant social elevator in the East than in the West, first and foremost because the ground level was much lower.
otar 2y ago
> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. This is the most important point from the article. My theory is that if you are not obsessed with something, you won’t be good enough with it, wether it’s a math, coding, business or something else… Thats how most of us got started in tech from the early ages.
- Ma8ee 2y ago
  It depends on what you mean by “good enough”. Most developers today aren’t particularly passionate about it, and certainly not obsessed, but the demand for them is high enough so they still are “good enough” to have relatively cushy jobs.
  - otar 2y ago
    That's a good point, but it can also be that the employer is satisfied with the "good enough" results. While it is true that the current high demand on a job market allows many to have "good enough" skills for employment, I would argue that passion, curiosity, and obsession are the driving forces that lead to better outcomes both for individuals and the industry as a whole. These qualities inspire deeper engagement and lead to more quality work. For routine tasks, basic competence might suffice. However, for solving complex problems, it won't... Passion/curiosity/obsession often leads to voluntary, extensive practice and learning. This typically results in faster skill acquisition and a deeper understanding of the subject matter. While becoming competent without any of these is possible, the path is often slower and limited. Also, both the tech industry and the job market are evolving rapidly. Passionate/curious/obsessed developers are more likely to keep up with new technologies and methodologies, potentially leading to better long-term career prospects and adaptability. The pace of change in our industry demands a continuous hunger for knowledge and a relentless pursuit of excellence. In the end, if you don't want to be a mediocre developer with a mediocre career, such stuff matters.
dyauspitr 2y ago
He almost lost me when he said the USSR was punching about its weight with a lower population which is untrue. The USSR had a significantly higher population than the US during the Cold War.
aryonoco 2y ago
[flagged]
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  Would you like to share why or do you just want to insult the piece?
- dang 2y ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
gradschoolfail 2y ago
Peripheral, but not totally irrelevant: Psmith was an Edwardian dandy of PGWodehouse’s imagination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psmith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psmith
- generationP 2y ago
  And I thought it was a pun on p-zombies...
  - gradschoolfail 2y ago
    If.. they are commenting on Marxism* but occasionally review philosophical books (e.g., by the inventor of the Lanczos) … quite reasonable to assume its a job title, imho */Martianism aka Gyorgy-Marxism
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  8 billion people in this world, yet Jane Psmith and John Psmith have oddly familiar voices: the μορφή of their writing brings to mind some ὕλη of yesteryear...
  - gradschoolfail 2y ago
    https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-spirit-of-the-mountains https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-spirit-of-the-mounta... ὕλημπίλιες?
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      > ...which is most unusual because it isn’t a book about hill people, but a book by a hill person. These are rare. Formal education isn’t highly valued in hill people cultures, and giving away information about your tribe is practically taboo. Rory Miller is unusual because most people who do applied violence ("corrections") don't also have the temperament to theorise about it, or if they do, little inclination to thereupon write it down. > She gains the courage of the fatalist Compare Epictetus, or even "Pluggers"? EDIT: for that matter, Cassandra in particular, and the trojan women in general > no comparative analysis of the Mongols and the Comanches I did run across one of these a while back: a blog post, not a book, but still an analytic comparison nonetheless. EDIT2: thinking of my locals: our origin stories are as a hill people (armor doesn't work well when it can't manoeuvre, in the XIII as in chechnya) but somehow we've picked up a hefty memeplex of conflict resolution skills on the way to the present?
isaacfrond 2y ago
omg, 'midwit teacher deducts marks for failing to write answers in a designated format' this is exactly the math teacher my kids have. So frustrating.
- sahmeepee 2y ago
  In this country many teachers have been taught that it's important for kids to be able to use a range of approaches to solve a problem. They then force them to use each of the prescribed set of methods even when they are totally inappropriate for the task. Any deviation from the method they are told to use for that question is wrong. No creation of your own adapted methods is acceptable. In other words, the teachers were taught that kids should use different methods, but seemingly weren't taught why.
  - ykonstant 2y ago
    "You're all individuals!" "Yes!" "You're all different!" "We're all different!" "..I'm not." "Shh."
data_maan 2y ago
If Russians punch way above their weight demographically and are so good at math - how come then that the French have even more Fields medals per capita? Maybe this article was written by a Russian troll farm, as it is essentially claiming Russian math supremacy.
kreyenborgi 2y ago
This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-) I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work). Does anyone have good experiences with keeping kids math-interested as they get into their teens? My kid used to enjoy math in school, and love talking about math problems ("can you help me set up that triangle pyramid thing with the sums again"), but now is seemingly disillusioned and finds the school exercises boring. Combine that with, well, teen-age, and I fear it's going to be hard to get back the spark. Not that it has to come back, but I'd hate for the interest to turn into dislike due to lack of opportunities.
- tempfile 2y ago
  School is where you kid spends the majority of the time. If they find it boring, and the school is unable/unwilling to provide enrichment, then it is an uphill battle to resist that. The ideal solution is to make the work they do at school engaging, then they'll seek out enrichment at home themselves. There might be math-oriented stuff online (3Blue1Brown is one off the top of my head) that keeps them wanting to understand more. That might anchor their school work a bit, or give them something extra to try. Books can help too.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Being a product of the US school system, the most important lesson it taught me is that teachers as well as students are caught up in a system that's bigger than they are, so in order to educate oneself, one need merely (a) organise one's own time effectively, but (b) avoid doing so indiscreetly, such that it could force other pawns to call one's lack of genuine participation to the attention of the Man. 90% of success in primary and secondary schooling is just showing up; as long as you keep your grades up, they won't demand mental attendance, only the physical. denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken und Mauern entzwei: die Gedanken sind frei.
    - 2y ago
noemit 2y ago
USSR was feminist in some regards. Women had women-only spaces to learn math and science. There is a lot more equality of performance in STEM in former soviet populations.
- eru 2y ago
  As mentioned in the article, that might be completely explained by their comparative poverty.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    > This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science — which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it. This isn't a complete explanation: we can see this by looking at other STEM fields. The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested. You don't get such a dramatic demographic shift because of innate tendencies, but this was contemporaneous with a shift from programming being considered low-status to high-status work. Is this perhaps social, rather than directly economic? To take an example from elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718072): I can see the “you must use this method” prescription hitting girls harder than boys, since girls tend to drift towards copying / collaborative play, and boys tend to drift towards competitive play. This prescription might make mathematics seem less like play, to girls – which would be ironic, since real mathematics is an incredibly collaborative endeavour. (Which raises the question: do girls inherently prefer copying play, and boys inherently prefer competition play? Who knows? I suspect not, but I think it'll be a long time before we find out.)
    - vundercind 2y ago
      > The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested. We eliminated the job women were dominating (programmer) by combining it with the one men were dominating (analyst). At the same time law and medicine were seeing huge increases in the proportion of women practitioners, so the status thing doesn’t make a ton of sense as an explanation. Besides, it was not high status in the 80s when this was going on (or the 90s… arguably it’s still not, just high pay)
timthorn 2y ago
Axiom Maths is trying to import the concept of maths circles to the UK, providing support and materials for schools to host their own circles. It is run by a team with deep expertise in mathematics education, including the founding head of King's Maths School, a state school that is one of the top performing sixth forms in the country. https://axiommaths.com/how-we-work/ https://axiommaths.com/how-we-work/
- jarvist 2y ago
  Practically speaking (running a little maths circle in the UK for my children, and some of their friends from nursery and primary school), I have found the Nrich website to be the single best source of resources: https://nrich.maths.org/about-nrich https://nrich.maths.org/about-nrich There is also https://parallel.org.uk/ https://parallel.org.uk/ by Simon Singh, but this is aimed at ages ~10+. The book by Rozhkovskaya has some really nice activities in it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1470416956 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1470416956 The book by Zvonkin described in the article is a very good motivator, particularly for the honest descriptions of lessons gone badly wrong, and staying up late cutting out pieces of cardboard! But it's quite difficult to use as a teaching resource.
  - hugetim 2y ago
    A nice source of middle- and high-school aged problems: https://www.usamts.org/ https://www.usamts.org/ One of the joys of high school was discussing these with a friend (after submission---but one could forego the contest and just do the circle thing with them for fun).
  - dfeng 2y ago
    I would love to hear more about your experiences running a maths circle here in the UK. My two daughters are a little young (3.5 and 0.5), but this article has inspired me to get the ball rolling.
    - jarvist 2y ago
      It's been really rewarding. I definitely recommend jumping in. I started with my reception-age child (+ school friends), and have just extended it to their younger sibling (+ friends from nursery). Your 3.5 year old will have started the EYFS (Early Years Foundational Stage) syllabus at nursery if they attend (which is also what they do in the 'Reception' year at primary school, before starting the national curriculum in the first year), so they will now be exposed to counting and comparisons. The perfect time to get started, in other words! The NRICH material is really good: https://nrich.maths.org/teachers/early-years https://nrich.maths.org/teachers/early-years There's some NRICH funded research that showed that exposure to symmetry and reasoning at this level was much more predictive of future abilities than numbers and counting. I think when parents try and help at the early stages, they often try to e.g. get their kids to count to 100, which is conceptually identical to counting to 10. For number fluency there is the free White Rose '1 minute maths' app, which does a very nice job of gamifying subitising & etc. A lot of primary schools in London seem to have adopted the White Rose teaching resources. https://whiteroseeducation.com/1-minute-maths https://whiteroseeducation.com/1-minute-maths
noemit 2y ago
My parents grew up in the Former Soviet Area so I will share this anecdote: Both of my parents studied Chemistry. Math is really important in our family. You are shamed if you don't understand something logical. My dad still had to do military service even if he studied. There was no strong incentive to study other than the fact that it was free and something to do for people who had no jobs, only 1 hour of TV per day, etc. My hot take is that lack of entertainment and the fact that education was one of the only free things available to them was a large contributing factor.
lain98 2y ago
I have been trying to join/create a circle as an adult. I asked some of my online friends but no interest so far.
- spydum 2y ago
  It's interesting to me, as if you read Benjamin Franklins biography, he mentions creating a literary circle being super important. I suspect many of our important thoughts leaders through history created small social circles where they hyperfocused on their domain with friends in a more social way
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Mailing lists (the N:N variety, not the modern 1:N abomination) were such, and for a few, still are.
d--b 2y ago
The main cultural difference is that Americans don’t value maths and physics as much as they value law and business. Harvard Law school is still the thing you aim for when you’re a smart kid. MIT is what you aim when you’re good AND you’re really into it. In France, the top thing to do is go to Polytechnique, which is an engineer school created by Napoleon. So culturally French people push their kids towards learning maths.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  the provenance is unclear, but somehow Napoleon wound up with both a construction problem and a theorem to his name (if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA?)
  - d--b 2y ago
    > if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA? Usually business school, HEC is the second highest viewed thing. ENA is something you may do later, either after political science studies, or after polytechnique, or business school.
- antupis 2y ago
  It is so interesting that those are always so country-specific here in Finland it is Medicine and industrial management.
hoseja 2y ago
Those hyperlinks to other relevant content seem especially devious from this author. I have dozen new tabs of reading open now.
Muromec 2y ago
Can we please stop calling "russian" on everyone from ussr and/or having a Slavic-sounding name.
amykyta 2y ago
Curious (not) how Soviets just became ‘russian’. This is soft propaganda once again.
- defrost 2y ago
  Cast your mind back 33 years . . . The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...
usgroup 2y ago
It ends like this, largely cancelling out the rest of the article: >In the second iteration of the circle, all of his notes are completely useless, and all of his initial attempts to teach anything fail, because these are different kids with different aptitudes and different interests. Zvonkin, raised in a communist society and a believer in the absolute malleability of human nature, is fairly bowled over by this, especially by how young all these differences are manifesting. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got quite lucky with his first set of children, and that the second group were much more challenging to teach.8 The most eloquent testimony to this is that after about a year he gives up, and the journal ends abruptly.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I would say in a nutshell, teaching results:YMMV
- wrycoder 2y ago
  Thanks, your comment makes me want to read the book!
hyperbrainer 2y ago
As a teenager who dislikes the current schooling system, what I am most curious about is actually why something like the "mathematical circles" do not exist in the west. To some extent, a similar social group is formed by robotics teams in my experience. A dedicated teacher/coach and a bunch of people who like electronics can really get amazing things done. Why is this the case?
- masto 2y ago
  Maybe you already know or could try to find other peers who like math, and see if you can get something started? I think there's a good chance that if you approached a supportive teacher with "my four friends and I want to start a math club, can you help us?", it would get the ball rolling. Perhaps you could put something up on the bulletin board or equivalent you kids have these days, data kiosks or hovergrams or whatever.
  - hyperbrainer 2y ago
    Oh boy did I try and try. Unfortunately, my school suffers from two problems: it is very small - so less potential candidates for both teachers and students, and it has a culture of anti-intellectualism; for some reason, everybody hates maths, thinks it is hard and so on. I mean I tried to do an engineering/robotics thing. Even that was unsuccessful. People were _afraid_? of doing things.
    - masto 2y ago
      Sorry to hear that. My school experience was a long while ago now, but very similar to what you described. I feel like I'm supposed to impart some wisdom, so I guess I'd add.. once I got out of high school, none of it mattered. Don't let it get you down.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  Why not join the robotics team? Plenty of problems like inverse kinematics and probably newer mathematical approaches.
- 2y ago
harimau777 2y ago
My biggest issue with math education is that after we learned the theory we never went back and developed an actual plan for solving the problems. For example, we learned a dozen different ways to approach integration, but after all this we never really put together a workable strategy for approaching a problem and deciding what tools to use. It's like trying to teach someone to swim by just throwing them in the water over and over and expecting them to eventually figure it out. As a result, the primary emotion students learn to associate with math problems is fear. Instead of the sense of confidence that comes with having a plan, each problem feels like "will things work out or will I get lost and waste hours without actually ever finding a solution".
- kurisufag 2y ago
  The best strategy is one suited to you because you came up with it yourself, in my opinion. Other than the big kludges (u-substitution, etc.), teaching specific/mechanistic integration processes directly would have been an uncomfortable way for me to learn.
- veunes 2y ago
  A more structured approach would definitely help! And I think that's the reason why ao many are affraid of math
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I would say the opposite, we're teaching them how to swim (the exercises the article talks about) without a swimming pool (real problems).
- pokerface_86 2y ago
  you face the exact same problems with coding, arguably more so as the trial and error and debugging process is worse than any proof i’ve ever had to do. if you can’t figure out how to apply basic integration techniques without a teacher formally sitting you down and saying exactly what situations to use each formula in, you haven’t learned shit
deleted 2y ago
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fifilura 2y ago
I simply think the basic assumptions that anything was better in Soviet is wrong. They just focused much higher percentage of GDP on military and space stuff. Meanwhile, life in Russia was miserable. They got tanks, nuclear weapons and rockets. No companies that made people's life better. This is what kept the cold war going. Until it didn't. If you are wrong the basic assumptions, you can look for clues anywhere, it does not matter.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >I simply think the basic assumptions that anything was better in Soviet is wrong. Agreed, it's bizarre to assume the Soviet version of anything is better than the what the US or other western nations are doing.

345 points by background 2y ago

The author raises an interesting question as to how the Soviets produced so much scientific talent, but his discussion of math circles strikes me as more of a tangent than a convincing answer. Were these math circles really so widespread, and were they a big part of producing mathematical and scientific question? He doesn't address this. However, the book he is reviewing is available online [1] and I see from skimming it that Zvonkin says only one of his students ultimately chose math as a profession. My hunch is that the structure of the formal education system in the USSR played a larger role. [1] https://sites.icmc.usp.br/sasha_a/zvonkin-e.pdf https://sites.icmc.usp.br/sasha_a/zvonkin-e.pdf

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
[flagged]
- lupire 2y ago
  They invented space ships, for one thing. Russian was a scientific power in the 19th Century before Soviet Union, and continued during the Soviet era. The west had limited access to it, due to the Cold War. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Ru...
  - avmich 2y ago
    Soviet Union wasn't called a superpower for nothing. USSR had many world class achievements in scientific and applied areas, and some organizational achievements in social and manufacturing areas. There are examples and counterexamples, but the result is what we have, and while at some areas ex-Soviets were seen as backwards people in early 1990-s, in some others they really brought some positive advancements to the West - or First World - when the borders became open.
    - m_mueller 2y ago
      Case in point: The reason why the US heavily relied on Soviet rocket engines for their launches for ~15 years (before SpaceX dominance) was because they were simply more advanced and cost effective. Material science apparently was a step above - Soviet scientists were able to create an alloy for use in oxygen-rich engines which was unbelievable to Western counterparts till they visited and had it demonstrated.
      - avmich 2y ago
        This is one example, and there could be many - both where USSR had an edge and where it was behind. I believe here we want to have the overall picture - and that picture was that there actually were some novelties which were interesting on the West, even though in overall quality of life and some associated parameters USSR was notably losing. Or, saying it from another end, USSR wasn't advanced enough to avoid dissolution after - not necessarily caused by - the Cold war, even though it had some achievements unavailable on the West.
        m_mueller 2y ago
        Yes, that was what I also wanted to point out here. As in, the set of novelties Soviets had over the West was at least non-zero. And that rocketry happened to be one may be surprising to some of those less informed about space technology.
  - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
    Lol what
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  The Soviets produced a lot of outstanding mathematicians. It's remarkable in absolute terms and it's even more remarkable considering that Soviet education was generally anti-science for much of its existence (e.g. see [0]). IIRC Stalin eventually left a group of mathematicians and physicists alone because it was clear that if they were suppressed the Soviet Union couldn't win wars or plan the economy. My initial hypothesis would be that creating this kind of playground in the otherwise dismal intellectual atmosphere, combined with the ability to select the best people from all over the empire, and the urgency and funding that came with the wars and cold war, played a major role in their ability to do important work. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the_S...
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  If you study much of 20th century mathematics and physics, you'll certainly find Soviet mathematicians showing up everywhere. Control theory, probability, nonlinear differential equations, etc. Just from the names of theorems alone, it's pretty hard to miss.
- komali2 2y ago
  Quantify in my opinion requires qualify because, how many is "a lot?" But broad strokes, the USSR was an intellectual powerhouse. Add as many "in spite of"'s as you like, but in my opinion the "a lot" target is achieved. You mention science and I'll get to that, but I want to first target what I feel is a general misconception of the Soviet Union as like, a bleak concrete-ridden, muddy backwater of labor camps (it kinda was of course) with nothing to contribute to the world. Post revolutionary periods always produce fantastic art, literature, and social experiments. See post-revolutionary American religious scene for an example. In the Soviet Union, there's a clumping of great literature around 1917. Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_literature#Early_post-Revolutionary_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_literature#Early_post-... > The Imaginists were post-Revolution poetic movement, similar to English-language Imagists, that created poetry based on sequences of arresting and uncommon images. The major figures include Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Marienhof, and Rurik Ivnev.[65] Another important movement was the Oberiu (1927–1930s), which included the most famous Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934), Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) and Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903–1958).[66][67] Other famous authors experimenting with language included the novelists Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938), Yuri Olesha (1899–1960), Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) and Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938), the short-story writers Isaak Babel (1894–1940) and Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958). Sorry for the big copy paste, but, there's just so many of them, and to literature nerds, what they did was "groundbreaking." I know it sounds silly but let us literature nerds have our thing. Then there's a bunch of fun leftist / communist poetry, from Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nikolai Tikhonov (the "Could nails from such people be fashioned" guy). And on and on. Art had some interesting characters as well, "in spite of" the Socialist Realism thing. Isaak Brodsky, for example. Re: science, as someone else linked, efforts were hampered slightly by the repression of science that was perceived as in opposition to dialectical materialism, but in general the Soviet Union seemed very determined to create a lot of engineers. You have Fields medal winners: Grigory Margulis (interestingly he suffered from the Soviet antisemitism mentioned in this article), Vladimir Drinfeld, and Sergei Novikov. And you have nobel prize winners such as Nikolay Semenov, Nikolay Basov + Alexander Prokhorov, Pavel Cherenkov (the Cherenkov radiation guy) + Ilya Frank + Igor Tamm, Leonid Kantorovich (basically invented linear programming), Pyotr Kapitsa, and Lev Landau. Then there's the obvious such as the fact that the Soviets were first to put a satellite in orbit, first to put a human in orbit (arguably far more useful than putting a human on the moon, though putting a human on the moon is probably more inspiring). What is interesting is how during the time these may not be "contributions to science" due to the USA and the Soviet Union often not sharing advancements in science with eachother because of the Cold War. Imagine if the two nations had been cooperating with eachother. Then again maybe there wouldn't have been a "Space Race."
lupire 2y ago
It's all part and parcel of a deeply mathematical culture. "Math as a profession" is a limited subset of "professions that rely heavily on math", despite what some mathematicians might say.
ccppurcell 2y ago
And that one was his own son, if memory serves. Genetics and family culture may play a big role.
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  Another girl, not his daughter, from the girl's circle also became a mathematician (whereas the daughter is a professor of film studies). So, yes, genetic, family culture (most of the parents of the kids from the math circles were teachers or academics), interests...
atemerev 2y ago
The real answer is that we (I speak as a Russian) didn’t have such advanced computers in the USSR. What was routinely solved numerically in the US, had to be painstakingly traced analytically, and new methods had to be developed for such approaches, and mathematical education had to be boosted so enough people could work in the field (mostly developing new weapons, sadly).

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago

[flagged]

lovegrenoble 2y ago

The USSR was indeed the most reading country in the world. Soviet citizens spent approx. 11 hours a week reading books, newspapers and journals on average, which was twice more as the British, North Americans and French people did. It was the findings of the world study of 1966.

bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
Not a good metric for producing scientific talent, and it doesn't distinguish reading fiction from actually educating yourself. For the purposes of producing scientific talent, reading fiction helps you as much as watching TV.
- philosopher1234 2y ago
  I don’t know any definition of actually educating yourself that would exclude reading fiction. And why are you focused on the purpose of producing scientific talent?
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
    The article is trying to explain why the Soviets were so good at keeping up with the US in science/math
    - bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago
      Right... tell me you didn't read the article, am I right. That's why I didn't bother replying. I often feel the impulse to reply to "show everyone that this guy is talking nonsense" but if that's obvious other people will see it too, so I say nothing.
- 12345hn6789 2y ago
  This is an incredibly pessimistic view. Do you have any sources to these claims?
- 082349872349872 2y ago

lupire 2y ago

6 years ago and 10 years ago, with a few comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Math+from+Three+to+Seven https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Math+from+Three+to+Seven This book and the culture it come from are so influential, that many people who did "enrichment" have already been exposed to many of the activities in the book. Most famous may be the Scratch JR / code.org introductory computer programming, but with pencil and paper.

dang 2y ago
Ah good find. Macroexpanded: Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17018583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17018583 - May 2018 (20 comments) Math from Three to Seven: Chapters One and Three [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811334 - Dec 2014 (21 comments)

bee_rider 2y ago

I think this must be a very stupid question, but I’ll ask it anyway. I always thought the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population wise, and really did punch above their weight. But Soviet Union census of 1970 lists 241,720,134 people, while the US census of 1970 lists 203,392,031 people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Soviet_census https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Soviet_census https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_United_States_census https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_United_States_census Is this statistic somehow not representative? If so, what’s up with that? If not, is the belief that the Soviet Union was smaller than the US population widespread and wrong? If it is widespread and wrong, where’s it come from? (Although, I must admit the possibility that it isn’t widespread, and was just unusually wrong. In which case the answer is just that I’m unusually bad at geopolitics, which would not be surprising at all).

aklemm 2y ago
Probably just conflating Soviet Union with Russia, which does have a smaller population. The Soviet Union encompassed so many more countries.
dankwizard 2y ago
I don't think anybody except you thought it was smaller. Why are you suggesting theres a widespread misconception instead of the more likely alternative - you made a mistake?
- johnfn 2y ago
  The article strongly implies this. > These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking.
  - qup 2y ago
    Also > Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?

tightbookkeeper 2y ago

Every study which examines different populations across the world and expects them to be identical will be confused. If every cultural group was equally interested in math, that would be shocking.

myth_drannon 2y ago

I have this book, it's a fun read but difficult to replicate on your own. Tried on my children but it's hard work and I'm not a mathematician like the author and the society is different.

com2kid 2y ago

From the book being reviewed: > All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. And in this, Eastern Europeans had a clear superiority, a cultural advantage. They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely. IMHO this is what drove American superiority in software engineering for several decades. The people who self selected into software engineering really loved the field. I suspect we'll see a continuous slow decrease in all aspects of quality of software as those who have a genuine love and passion for the field are replaced by those in it just for the money.

dinobones 2y ago
Good example of passion from early bell Labs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 Other examples I can think of (from my Gen Z experience, growing up in SoCal): - Elementary school: Making custom action replay codes, hacking game saves with programs, CheatEngine/memory/hex editor and following YouTube tutorials, Javascript "document.contentEditable=true" hack and changing stuff on websites, pressing F12 and changing random javascript code until something interesting happens or breaks. - Middle school: making sites on Weebly/freewebs, embedding chats and flash games on them, sharing them during computer class - High school: Making PHP sites/vbulliten/Newgrounds/flash games, later iOS apps I wasn't the only one doing these things. There were always like 3 other kids like me in any classroom that would do the same things. Most of us ended up becoming passionate SWEs, besides one that became an accountant.
Onavo 2y ago
> They had been trained, from an early age, to love mathematics more intensely. Nonsense, sounds like post-hoc rationalization. Maybe talk to some actual Slavic people. Sure the Russians had "math clubs" and "chess clubs" but it wasn't as if the US didn't have RadioShack and garage/ham culture. Talk to some of the older generations that still remember the Berlin Wall and you might also understand why so many women from the ex USSR states are in STEM while it's the opposite in the West. TL;dr: STEM was a quick way to prosperity, the eastern bloc countries were poor, and engineers are useful even in a communist regime. They studied math because there wasn't much else they couldn't have done.

svat 2y ago

When my kid was three I encountered this lovely book and thought I'd read it to attempt to replicate something like it (despite all the warnings that it's a journal and not a guide); unfortunately I never got around to finishing the book (nothing against the book, just got distracted) and now the kid's already past seven :) But what little I read was delightful; thanks for posting this summary!

drivebyhooting 2y ago
I have a similar experience. The book skips the first 20 weeks. Many of the activities require materials and I could have benefited from a more prescriptive curriculum. Some other math circle curricula are not as inspiring but are much easier to follow.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  Yep, I thought the idea seemed cool, but I couldn't figure out how to execute it.
  - nicolas_t 2y ago
    A couple of other books that I think are useful and easier to execute than Zvonkin's books are the books by Christopher Danielson. Which One Doesn't Belong? is great to play with a child and Talking Math with Your Kids has some good ideas (way too short though)
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  The book skips the first 20 weeks for the boys but covers those activities for the girls (around the end of the book). So I'd suggest reading the girl circle and then coming back to the boys circle... I've absolutely loved that book and I've been trying to incorporate some of the ideas in games with my son. That said, do keep in mind that despite being from 3 to 7, his son is actually 3 years old and 10 months when he started (and I think the same for the daughter, I forgot). Personally, I've noticed that my just turned 3 years old son is not developmentally ready for a lot of the activities yet (but he's been surprisingly good at other activities), so I do think that you need to adapt depending on the children you try this on.

Illniyar 2y ago

Regarding Soviet prowess, I always considered the fact that going to higher education considerably shortened and made easier your military draft term to be a main factor. Everyone who could went to university, because why wouldn't you? This incentive pressure and selection bias we're probably insane.

generationP 2y ago
That and even better: it opened the doors towards a lot of the better jobs, both in terms of working conditions and offering some amount of breathing room. Education was a more significant social elevator in the East than in the West, first and foremost because the ground level was much lower.

otar 2y ago

> All joking aside, we fledgling mathematicians understood that the single most important thing was not raw intelligence or knowledge (Americans tend to lag behind in the latter compared to all international students). What mattered was passion. The way to become successful in mathematics, like almost every endeavor, is to care about it, to love it, to obsess over it. This is the most important point from the article. My theory is that if you are not obsessed with something, you won’t be good enough with it, wether it’s a math, coding, business or something else… Thats how most of us got started in tech from the early ages.

Ma8ee 2y ago
It depends on what you mean by “good enough”. Most developers today aren’t particularly passionate about it, and certainly not obsessed, but the demand for them is high enough so they still are “good enough” to have relatively cushy jobs.
- otar 2y ago
  That's a good point, but it can also be that the employer is satisfied with the "good enough" results. While it is true that the current high demand on a job market allows many to have "good enough" skills for employment, I would argue that passion, curiosity, and obsession are the driving forces that lead to better outcomes both for individuals and the industry as a whole. These qualities inspire deeper engagement and lead to more quality work. For routine tasks, basic competence might suffice. However, for solving complex problems, it won't... Passion/curiosity/obsession often leads to voluntary, extensive practice and learning. This typically results in faster skill acquisition and a deeper understanding of the subject matter. While becoming competent without any of these is possible, the path is often slower and limited. Also, both the tech industry and the job market are evolving rapidly. Passionate/curious/obsessed developers are more likely to keep up with new technologies and methodologies, potentially leading to better long-term career prospects and adaptability. The pace of change in our industry demands a continuous hunger for knowledge and a relentless pursuit of excellence. In the end, if you don't want to be a mediocre developer with a mediocre career, such stuff matters.

dyauspitr 2y ago

He almost lost me when he said the USSR was punching about its weight with a lower population which is untrue. The USSR had a significantly higher population than the US during the Cold War.

aryonoco 2y ago

[flagged]

shepherdjerred 2y ago
Would you like to share why or do you just want to insult the piece?
dang 2y ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

gradschoolfail 2y ago

Peripheral, but not totally irrelevant: Psmith was an Edwardian dandy of PGWodehouse’s imagination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psmith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psmith

generationP 2y ago
And I thought it was a pun on p-zombies...
- gradschoolfail 2y ago
  If.. they are commenting on Marxism* but occasionally review philosophical books (e.g., by the inventor of the Lanczos) … quite reasonable to assume its a job title, imho */Martianism aka Gyorgy-Marxism
082349872349872 2y ago
8 billion people in this world, yet Jane Psmith and John Psmith have oddly familiar voices: the μορφή of their writing brings to mind some ὕλη of yesteryear...
- gradschoolfail 2y ago
  https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-spirit-of-the-mountains https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-spirit-of-the-mounta... ὕλημπίλιες?
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    > ...which is most unusual because it isn’t a book about hill people, but a book by a hill person. These are rare. Formal education isn’t highly valued in hill people cultures, and giving away information about your tribe is practically taboo. Rory Miller is unusual because most people who do applied violence ("corrections") don't also have the temperament to theorise about it, or if they do, little inclination to thereupon write it down. > She gains the courage of the fatalist Compare Epictetus, or even "Pluggers"? EDIT: for that matter, Cassandra in particular, and the trojan women in general > no comparative analysis of the Mongols and the Comanches I did run across one of these a while back: a blog post, not a book, but still an analytic comparison nonetheless. EDIT2: thinking of my locals: our origin stories are as a hill people (armor doesn't work well when it can't manoeuvre, in the XIII as in chechnya) but somehow we've picked up a hefty memeplex of conflict resolution skills on the way to the present?

isaacfrond 2y ago

omg, 'midwit teacher deducts marks for failing to write answers in a designated format' this is exactly the math teacher my kids have. So frustrating.

sahmeepee 2y ago
In this country many teachers have been taught that it's important for kids to be able to use a range of approaches to solve a problem. They then force them to use each of the prescribed set of methods even when they are totally inappropriate for the task. Any deviation from the method they are told to use for that question is wrong. No creation of your own adapted methods is acceptable. In other words, the teachers were taught that kids should use different methods, but seemingly weren't taught why.
- ykonstant 2y ago
  "You're all individuals!" "Yes!" "You're all different!" "We're all different!" "..I'm not." "Shh."

data_maan 2y ago

If Russians punch way above their weight demographically and are so good at math - how come then that the French have even more Fields medals per capita? Maybe this article was written by a Russian troll farm, as it is essentially claiming Russian math supremacy.

kreyenborgi 2y ago

This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-) I'm unsure if it implies that "lame school exercises" are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I've recently read articles about how teaching "insight" without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work). Does anyone have good experiences with keeping kids math-interested as they get into their teens? My kid used to enjoy math in school, and love talking about math problems ("can you help me set up that triangle pyramid thing with the sums again"), but now is seemingly disillusioned and finds the school exercises boring. Combine that with, well, teen-age, and I fear it's going to be hard to get back the spark. Not that it has to come back, but I'd hate for the interest to turn into dislike due to lack of opportunities.

tempfile 2y ago
School is where you kid spends the majority of the time. If they find it boring, and the school is unable/unwilling to provide enrichment, then it is an uphill battle to resist that. The ideal solution is to make the work they do at school engaging, then they'll seek out enrichment at home themselves. There might be math-oriented stuff online (3Blue1Brown is one off the top of my head) that keeps them wanting to understand more. That might anchor their school work a bit, or give them something extra to try. Books can help too.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Being a product of the US school system, the most important lesson it taught me is that teachers as well as students are caught up in a system that's bigger than they are, so in order to educate oneself, one need merely (a) organise one's own time effectively, but (b) avoid doing so indiscreetly, such that it could force other pawns to call one's lack of genuine participation to the attention of the Man. 90% of success in primary and secondary schooling is just showing up; as long as you keep your grades up, they won't demand mental attendance, only the physical. denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken und Mauern entzwei: die Gedanken sind frei.
  - 2y ago

noemit 2y ago

USSR was feminist in some regards. Women had women-only spaces to learn math and science. There is a lot more equality of performance in STEM in former soviet populations.

eru 2y ago
As mentioned in the article, that might be completely explained by their comparative poverty.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science — which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it. This isn't a complete explanation: we can see this by looking at other STEM fields. The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested. You don't get such a dramatic demographic shift because of innate tendencies, but this was contemporaneous with a shift from programming being considered low-status to high-status work. Is this perhaps social, rather than directly economic? To take an example from elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41718072): I can see the “you must use this method” prescription hitting girls harder than boys, since girls tend to drift towards copying / collaborative play, and boys tend to drift towards competitive play. This prescription might make mathematics seem less like play, to girls – which would be ironic, since real mathematics is an incredibly collaborative endeavour. (Which raises the question: do girls inherently prefer copying play, and boys inherently prefer competition play? Who knows? I suspect not, but I think it'll be a long time before we find out.)
  - vundercind 2y ago
    > The early years of computer programming were dominated by women, yet nowadays, women are proportionally uninterested. We eliminated the job women were dominating (programmer) by combining it with the one men were dominating (analyst). At the same time law and medicine were seeing huge increases in the proportion of women practitioners, so the status thing doesn’t make a ton of sense as an explanation. Besides, it was not high status in the 80s when this was going on (or the 90s… arguably it’s still not, just high pay)

timthorn 2y ago

Axiom Maths is trying to import the concept of maths circles to the UK, providing support and materials for schools to host their own circles. It is run by a team with deep expertise in mathematics education, including the founding head of King's Maths School, a state school that is one of the top performing sixth forms in the country. https://axiommaths.com/how-we-work/ https://axiommaths.com/how-we-work/

jarvist 2y ago
Practically speaking (running a little maths circle in the UK for my children, and some of their friends from nursery and primary school), I have found the Nrich website to be the single best source of resources: https://nrich.maths.org/about-nrich https://nrich.maths.org/about-nrich There is also https://parallel.org.uk/ https://parallel.org.uk/ by Simon Singh, but this is aimed at ages ~10+. The book by Rozhkovskaya has some really nice activities in it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1470416956 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1470416956 The book by Zvonkin described in the article is a very good motivator, particularly for the honest descriptions of lessons gone badly wrong, and staying up late cutting out pieces of cardboard! But it's quite difficult to use as a teaching resource.
- hugetim 2y ago
  A nice source of middle- and high-school aged problems: https://www.usamts.org/ https://www.usamts.org/ One of the joys of high school was discussing these with a friend (after submission---but one could forego the contest and just do the circle thing with them for fun).
- dfeng 2y ago
  I would love to hear more about your experiences running a maths circle here in the UK. My two daughters are a little young (3.5 and 0.5), but this article has inspired me to get the ball rolling.
  - jarvist 2y ago
    It's been really rewarding. I definitely recommend jumping in. I started with my reception-age child (+ school friends), and have just extended it to their younger sibling (+ friends from nursery). Your 3.5 year old will have started the EYFS (Early Years Foundational Stage) syllabus at nursery if they attend (which is also what they do in the 'Reception' year at primary school, before starting the national curriculum in the first year), so they will now be exposed to counting and comparisons. The perfect time to get started, in other words! The NRICH material is really good: https://nrich.maths.org/teachers/early-years https://nrich.maths.org/teachers/early-years There's some NRICH funded research that showed that exposure to symmetry and reasoning at this level was much more predictive of future abilities than numbers and counting. I think when parents try and help at the early stages, they often try to e.g. get their kids to count to 100, which is conceptually identical to counting to 10. For number fluency there is the free White Rose '1 minute maths' app, which does a very nice job of gamifying subitising & etc. A lot of primary schools in London seem to have adopted the White Rose teaching resources. https://whiteroseeducation.com/1-minute-maths https://whiteroseeducation.com/1-minute-maths

noemit 2y ago

My parents grew up in the Former Soviet Area so I will share this anecdote: Both of my parents studied Chemistry. Math is really important in our family. You are shamed if you don't understand something logical. My dad still had to do military service even if he studied. There was no strong incentive to study other than the fact that it was free and something to do for people who had no jobs, only 1 hour of TV per day, etc. My hot take is that lack of entertainment and the fact that education was one of the only free things available to them was a large contributing factor.

lain98 2y ago

I have been trying to join/create a circle as an adult. I asked some of my online friends but no interest so far.

spydum 2y ago
It's interesting to me, as if you read Benjamin Franklins biography, he mentions creating a literary circle being super important. I suspect many of our important thoughts leaders through history created small social circles where they hyperfocused on their domain with friends in a more social way
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Mailing lists (the N:N variety, not the modern 1:N abomination) were such, and for a few, still are.

d--b 2y ago

The main cultural difference is that Americans don’t value maths and physics as much as they value law and business. Harvard Law school is still the thing you aim for when you’re a smart kid. MIT is what you aim when you’re good AND you’re really into it. In France, the top thing to do is go to Polytechnique, which is an engineer school created by Napoleon. So culturally French people push their kids towards learning maths.

082349872349872 2y ago
the provenance is unclear, but somehow Napoleon wound up with both a construction problem and a theorem to his name (if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA?)
- d--b 2y ago
  > if your kid has neither aptitude nor taste for maths, what do you do? push them towards ENA? Usually business school, HEC is the second highest viewed thing. ENA is something you may do later, either after political science studies, or after polytechnique, or business school.
antupis 2y ago
It is so interesting that those are always so country-specific here in Finland it is Medicine and industrial management.

hoseja 2y ago

Those hyperlinks to other relevant content seem especially devious from this author. I have dozen new tabs of reading open now.

Muromec 2y ago

Can we please stop calling "russian" on everyone from ussr and/or having a Slavic-sounding name.

amykyta 2y ago

Curious (not) how Soviets just became ‘russian’. This is soft propaganda once again.

defrost 2y ago
Cast your mind back 33 years . . . The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration № 142-Н of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...

usgroup 2y ago

It ends like this, largely cancelling out the rest of the article: >In the second iteration of the circle, all of his notes are completely useless, and all of his initial attempts to teach anything fail, because these are different kids with different aptitudes and different interests. Zvonkin, raised in a communist society and a believer in the absolute malleability of human nature, is fairly bowled over by this, especially by how young all these differences are manifesting. Reading between the lines, it sounds like he got quite lucky with his first set of children, and that the second group were much more challenging to teach.8 The most eloquent testimony to this is that after about a year he gives up, and the journal ends abruptly.

nuancebydefault 2y ago
I would say in a nutshell, teaching results:YMMV
wrycoder 2y ago
Thanks, your comment makes me want to read the book!

hyperbrainer 2y ago

As a teenager who dislikes the current schooling system, what I am most curious about is actually why something like the "mathematical circles" do not exist in the west. To some extent, a similar social group is formed by robotics teams in my experience. A dedicated teacher/coach and a bunch of people who like electronics can really get amazing things done. Why is this the case?

masto 2y ago
Maybe you already know or could try to find other peers who like math, and see if you can get something started? I think there's a good chance that if you approached a supportive teacher with "my four friends and I want to start a math club, can you help us?", it would get the ball rolling. Perhaps you could put something up on the bulletin board or equivalent you kids have these days, data kiosks or hovergrams or whatever.
- hyperbrainer 2y ago
  Oh boy did I try and try. Unfortunately, my school suffers from two problems: it is very small - so less potential candidates for both teachers and students, and it has a culture of anti-intellectualism; for some reason, everybody hates maths, thinks it is hard and so on. I mean I tried to do an engineering/robotics thing. Even that was unsuccessful. People were _afraid_? of doing things.
  - masto 2y ago
    Sorry to hear that. My school experience was a long while ago now, but very similar to what you described. I feel like I'm supposed to impart some wisdom, so I guess I'd add.. once I got out of high school, none of it mattered. Don't let it get you down.
nuancebydefault 2y ago
Why not join the robotics team? Plenty of problems like inverse kinematics and probably newer mathematical approaches.
2y ago

harimau777 2y ago

My biggest issue with math education is that after we learned the theory we never went back and developed an actual plan for solving the problems. For example, we learned a dozen different ways to approach integration, but after all this we never really put together a workable strategy for approaching a problem and deciding what tools to use. It's like trying to teach someone to swim by just throwing them in the water over and over and expecting them to eventually figure it out. As a result, the primary emotion students learn to associate with math problems is fear. Instead of the sense of confidence that comes with having a plan, each problem feels like "will things work out or will I get lost and waste hours without actually ever finding a solution".

kurisufag 2y ago
The best strategy is one suited to you because you came up with it yourself, in my opinion. Other than the big kludges (u-substitution, etc.), teaching specific/mechanistic integration processes directly would have been an uncomfortable way for me to learn.
veunes 2y ago
A more structured approach would definitely help! And I think that's the reason why ao many are affraid of math
nuancebydefault 2y ago
I would say the opposite, we're teaching them how to swim (the exercises the article talks about) without a swimming pool (real problems).
pokerface_86 2y ago
you face the exact same problems with coding, arguably more so as the trial and error and debugging process is worse than any proof i’ve ever had to do. if you can’t figure out how to apply basic integration techniques without a teacher formally sitting you down and saying exactly what situations to use each formula in, you haven’t learned shit

deleted 2y ago

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fifilura 2y ago

I simply think the basic assumptions that anything was better in Soviet is wrong. They just focused much higher percentage of GDP on military and space stuff. Meanwhile, life in Russia was miserable. They got tanks, nuclear weapons and rockets. No companies that made people's life better. This is what kept the cold war going. Until it didn't. If you are wrong the basic assumptions, you can look for clues anywhere, it does not matter.

Suppafly 2y ago
>I simply think the basic assumptions that anything was better in Soviet is wrong. Agreed, it's bizarre to assume the Soviet version of anything is better than the what the US or other western nations are doing.