I think that excellence in math is actually in everyone's reach. The main questions are why and how to reach it. :)
The article surveys the field of enrichment programs and activities, many of which are available only to people in certain areas. I've witnessed the immense local impact of those outreach efforts, while visiting Math Circles, high schools, and academic competitions around the country. The people who lead those events (mostly after-hours or on weekends) are an incredible bunch, and many of them do it out of their passion for the subject.
However, I think we would all gain if we could engage everyone in math/science, no matter where they live. The success of these programs shows that interesting content increases interest! The Internet allows us to level the playing field, and scale the impact of free educational resources to the world.
I was once at a math education conference where groups were pitching ways to develop math talent. These programs sometimes need financial sponsorship from governments or foundations, so that they can remain accessible across socioeconomic lines. On the second morning of the conference, I suddenly thought: how much money does our public school system spend trying to teach soccer each year? (I don't think it's much.) It seems that many students achieve fairly high levels of proficiency regardless.
Of course, there is still much value in funding the current math education efforts, but that made me think about whether significant gains could come from finding out how to communicate educational content in the most engaging way. That would take a page from the startup playbook (optimizing for engagement).
So, I got my hands dirty. I launched a startup (expii.com) to crowdsource and rate free interactive lessons in math and science, to quantitatively evaluate an organized collection of these resources, distributed at scale across the world. The objective is to turn every smartphone into a pocket tutor, delivering the most engaging lessons produced by the combined creativity of the world.
That's a big project. In the meantime, while the content is crowdsourcing, I also am broadcasting interesting nuggets of math each week at expii.com/solve (again free). These deliver the same topics I talk about in person at middle- and high-school math enrichment events around the country when I visit them to give guest talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sxVgJ_wPaM&feature=youtu.be...
My thought process is that if I'm taking the time to develop the materials to deliver to only 200 people at a time, then we should harness the Internet to scale the distribution to the world, while also packaging the content in a fun way, to show to the mass audience why math is actually a very interesting subject. :)
Ultimately, I think that the global project to build interest and excellence in math is an enormous task, which needs the insight and hard work of a great multitude of people, and a diversity of ideas and approaches. Thanks to everyone who is pitching in on this mission! :)