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The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

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Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#31
post #17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

János Bolyai [1], Theodore von Kármán [2], Leo Szilard [3], Dennis Gabor [4], Edward Teller [5], Paul Erdős [6], John von Neumann [7]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Bolyai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_von_Kármán [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Szilard [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Gabor [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul…

I am curious if it's because they are hungarian, or because they are jewish. Jews pay particular attention to science and arts, from what I gather from my jewish friends. Nobel laureates, for example, have disproportionate amount of jewish among them (compared to jewish population as a percentage of world population).

You're in luck! Here's a looong in-depth consideration of exactly that: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside...

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious if it's because they are hungarian, or because they are jewish. Jews pay particular attention to science and arts, from what I gather from my jewish friends. Nobel laureates, for example, have disproportionate amount of jewish among them (compared to jewish population as a percentage of world population).

You don't have to be curious for more than five minutes. Several of those mentioned are Jewish, but most of them are not. There are not disproportionately more Jewish Hungarian mathematicians, compared to the proportion of say, Jewish people in Budapest before WWII, or the proportion of Jewish people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Looking only at the first half of the twentieth century, there at least as many world-…

Except for Bolyai, all mentioned above are indeed Jewish. Also all mentioned in your other comment (Fejér etc.) except Bollobás. Also Wigner, mentioned in another comment.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#33

As a hungarian, I'm pretty surprised by this article, since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level. And however in the past, math education was world class, now the "old school" teachers are retiring and other than a handful of elite schools (Fazekas, Eötvös, Radnóti etc) most of the school…

> since the quality of hungarian education is getting worse and worse, thanks to the "reforms", which basically means they are spending less and less on education on all level

I always wondered what good metrics are to measure the quality of education. Since you say “worse and worse” can you share any insight to that? I mean you could potentially refer to the OECD world rankings but somehow I don’t trust those lists, since they “feel” quite mechanistic.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#34
post #6
post #2

> After the student investigation, the teacher highlights important ideas embedded in a concrete problem, and summarizes and generalizes their findings. In particular, the teacher’s summary makes sense and is meaningful, because students have had the experience of playing around with these ideas on their own before coming together to formalize them as a class. It's important for students to get their hands on example…

When you use this approach, you generally cover less material, but cover it better. For most classes, this seems like a good tradeoff. 4 classes isn't really that much. You can essentially replace the time students would normally spend "studying" with them spending that time working on the problems. Further, in my experience, this type of work is far more engaging than traditional studying, so it is easier for studen…

Moreover, as people practice, they can get generically better at meta-skills such as (in no particular order) skimming, close reading, constructing mental outlines of arguments, drawing diagrams and pictures, inventing examples to match given specifications, testing concrete examples against abstract statements, generalizing specific relationships discovered in the examples to abstract laws and proving them generically, discarding or modifying abstractions to better match a wider collection of examples, working backwards, discarding dead-end problem-solving strategies while mining them for partial useful results, breaking problems down into manageable pieces, deductive logic, generating hypotheses likely to be interesting, abandoning whole problems which turn out to be too hard and switching to something else, cross-applying solution strategies from one field to another, simplifying complex arguments by discarding or separating extraneous or duplicated steps, writing up explanations in clear and coherent way for various audiences, researching past work in an efficient way, diving into new fields with completely alien notation and terminology and quickly taking the lay of the land, and so on.

These skills are more generically useful than recipes or collections of facts about any particular subject, because they serve as multipliers for quite generic learning and problem-solving efficiency.

One big problem with trying to teach a single specific course in a very problem-centered / student-driven / socratic style is that often students have not been sufficiently trained in any of these meta skills, and as a result move at much slower pace than their potential because they waste a lot of time on inefficient problem-solving methods, get side-tracked, throw away useful work, explain things poorly, don’t get around to crystallizing their useful results, and so on. The more courses get taught in this style, the faster each subsequent course can move as students figure out how to learn effectively.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#35
post #16
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you give couple examples that are most prominent?

http://www.jurisich-koszeg.sulinet.hu/files/projekt/science/... The first 5 pages have names that are attached to lots and lots of theorems (disproportionately in combinatorics).

George Olah passed away in March.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#36
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to generalize, but by pretty much any metric you choose Hungary produced a massively disproportionate share of the outstanding mathematicians of the twentieth century.

can you give couple examples that are most prominent?

Recently Laszlo Babai, Endre Szemeredi, Mario Szegedy

In undergraduate studies the names Denes Konig, Tibor Gallai also come up discussing graphs.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#37
post #18

I'm not "bad" at math per se, but would there be much benefit in going from the ground up learning in the Hungarian form? I guess you could blow through the first 7~10 years of schooling in less than a year of dedicated study, but teaching yourself just up to before college level would take you a few years, right? Is there any online courses that have this content?

Reading George Polya's books might be a way of learning this technique. At least they explain very well the method of thinking about math.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#38
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious if it's because they are hungarian, or because they are jewish. Jews pay particular attention to science and arts, from what I gather from my jewish friends. Nobel laureates, for example, have disproportionate amount of jewish among them (compared to jewish population as a percentage of world population).

You don't have to be curious for more than five minutes. Several of those mentioned are Jewish, but most of them are not. There are not disproportionately more Jewish Hungarian mathematicians, compared to the proportion of say, Jewish people in Budapest before WWII, or the proportion of Jewish people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Looking only at the first half of the twentieth century, there at least as many world-…

Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 108-112 compared to a European average of ~100. This shifted mean means they have a much higher percentage of very smart people (~6 times per capita rate of >140iq which is the norm for Nobel prize winners)

This over representation of high IQ is similar to the historical over representation in Nobel prizes for hard sciences.

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to be curious for more than five minutes. Several of those mentioned are Jewish, but most of them are not. There are not disproportionately more Jewish Hungarian mathematicians, compared to the proportion of say, Jewish people in Budapest before WWII, or the proportion of Jewish people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Looking only at the first half of the twentieth century, there at least as many world-…

Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 108-112 compared to a European average of ~100. This shifted mean means they have a much higher percentage of very smart people (~6 times per capita rate of >140iq which is the norm for Nobel prize winners) This over representation of high IQ is similar to the historical over representation in Nobel prizes for hard sciences.

You can't make conclusions about the number >140 based on a shift of the mean. IQ is scaled so that the general population has a normal distribution. That doesn't necessarily mean some subpopulation has a normal distribution. Even if that was the case, the subpopulation distribution would still have a different standard deviation. (It would partly depend on the level of assortative mating within that population.)

Re: The Hungarian Approach and How It Fits the American Educational Landscape (2015)

#40
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to be curious for more than five minutes. Several of those mentioned are Jewish, but most of them are not. There are not disproportionately more Jewish Hungarian mathematicians, compared to the proportion of say, Jewish people in Budapest before WWII, or the proportion of Jewish people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Looking only at the first half of the twentieth century, there at least as many world-…

Except for Bolyai, all mentioned above are indeed Jewish. Also all mentioned in your other comment (Fejér etc.) except Bollobás. Also Wigner, mentioned in another comment.

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