Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by Youden » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #268

lsh123 wrote: post #80

Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished PhD from the same place. I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on. What separa…

> I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible I went to high school in Russia and then moved to Australia. The difference was immense. It felt like i just dropped 2 year levels. Even the accelerated programs were hopelessly behind the regular curriculum for my age group in Russia. AU/US high school students can't possibly compete against RU or CN high school studen…

> Doing well at your subjects in AU got you labelled as a nerd.

As an Australian nerd who got higher than average grades, it's not accurate in the slightest to generalize your experiences to my entire country and I haven't seen the anti-intellectualism you claim is there.

When I was in high school I was very much a nerd. Good grades, tried to win the approval of teachers, head in a book, never played sports, interested in chess and video games.

I definitely did not fit in. Making friends was difficult, I was teased and all the things I gather you had issues with.

However I also had a close friend who despite sharing my interests and grades, was also much more outgoing, participated in sports and was generally well-liked. He had no troubles at all fitting in.

To strengthen the counter-example even more, in grade 9, all of the highest academic achievers got put in the same class. These people did not have issues.

So intelligence clearly wasn't the problem. What I think the problem was is that I was quiet, shunned sports, kept to myself and occasionally saw my brains as making me better than other people. That's what led to the ostracizm that might be misinterpreted as anti-intellectualism.

Also, all traces of this were well and truly gone by years 11 and 12. At this point everyone is doing what they can to get into their chosen university so they can't criticize you for doing the same.

> A 12 year old in Russia is basically treated as a small adult with the associated respect and responsibilities. A 12 year old here is treated (and behaves) like a large baby.

I'm married to a Russian and my mother in law is a high school English teacher in Russia. I think you're very much overgeneralizing in these cases too.

Perhaps in some cities and families 12 year-olds are expected to behave the way you claim but it's definitely not universal. There are plenty of 12 year-olds who are allowed to be children in Russia.

> > Even the accelerated programs were hopelessly behind the regular curriculum for my age group in Russia.

Which curriculum? They vary by state. I believe the curriculum for maths and sciences in Victoria (my state) was very similar to the International Baccalaureate (I compared topics with students in that program).

If you want to point at an area in which Russia is significantly different, I'd point at the arts. In Russia children are expected to study and learn poetry and read literature from a very early age all the way through high school. It's not at all frowned upon. Boys choosing to learn "feminine" things like ballroom dancing also seems to be well accepted from what I've seen.

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

#622

Post by jimmaswell » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #266

jimmaswell wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rote learner learned nothing more than the ability to regurgitate a mechanical process while the academic learner learned understanding, in my view. You have to work through some examples to solidify it but that should be totally secondary to understanding the meaning and concepts. Like a physics teacher of mine put it, rote math learning is like teaching sea lions to honk horns for fish - students give the right…

Applying reasoning to a similar but more familiar domain is a good sanity check for said reasoning. Let's then apply what you said to programming. Would you say that the "academic learner" who read a lot of CS and programming books but haven't written a single program on an actual computer learned understanding, while a "rote learner" who keeps going through hundreds of small programming exercises learned to "regurgi…

I did say you need to do some exercises, just not an extreme amount or at the expense of theory. And these math exercises are different from programming - they amount to applying some process to different numbers over and over again while at least there would be some degree of problem solving if you wrote a bunch of genuinely different programs.

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

#623

Post by akhilcacharya » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #232

akhilcacharya wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see the issue. The internet exists now and you can access a world of content in seconds. I didn’t get any of this, ever in my mediocre education - I don’t see why so much focus should be placed on these elites at the expense of everyone else.

The internet you use to access content in seconds was created by those elites.

Sounds like hagiography to me. There were lots of ordinary, non-prodigies that built ARPANet, TCP/IP, the Unix/Windows network stack and HTTP. Plenty work at companies that build the network planes, like Cisco and AWS and Microsoft.

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

#624

Post by m463 » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

lsh123 wrote: post #80

Disclaimer: I graduated from one of the top math high schools in Moscow in early 90s, I have MS in Math from Moscow State University, and a half finished PhD from the same place. I think on average the difference between a high school student from Russia and US is negligible. Either country doesn’t really require much to finish school and many kids just do the tests without understanding what is going on. What separa…

It could also bet you can't stunt your growth with a calculator.

I've seen current students grasping at a calculator the first opportunity they were given.

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

#625

Post by new2628 » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #454

new2628 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like I said, we don't have that thing in small-ish cities. It's definitely a thing even in smaller cities with good highschools. Reunions for 10,20,30,40 years are very common and attended by all, including teachers still alive, etc.

We all have reunions, but I was saying that apart from them we don't keep that well in touch and we don't seem to show that 'esprit de corps' showed for example by OP (who mentioned his high-school) and by other people who went to prestigious high-schools from bigger cities.

Oh in small towns there is definitely some of that too, as in former classmates doing favors to each other, doing business together, as a miniature cartel running towns -- what I noticed to change in the past ~20years is that a good part of the elite left the country, so these local groups fell apart.

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

#626

Post by azernik » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

CalChris wrote: post #557

azernik wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UC Berkeley (where I did my CS degree) follows this model after admission. There's CS61A, an introductory class for people with some math/computers background, and CS3, an introduction for people coming in with no background. Successful and interested CS3 students are then funnelled into CS61A.

Yes but minus the math; what math there was in 61A was easy. 61A didn't really expect much prerequisite either, but then it took off quickly. A lot of work but not intellectually very hard. It was then taught in Scheme which no one knew. Scheme is an elegant language which we never used again. SICP was the course text which no one ever read. What I really remember was EE40 taking like a week to explain Ohm's Law. I t…

61A was easy in terms of math, but hard in terms of everything else. Every student I met who had never programmed before taking 61A found it intellectually quite challenging, both before and after the switch to Python; even without math, thinking in terms of computation and execution is not natural.

Given that second-hand experience, I found the excision of all of SICP's math from the curriculum to be quite a good choice, as adding advanced math as another prerequisite would have raised the barrier to entry even higher.

(Side note: your description of EE40 sounds like a professor who didn't schedule well, not intentional difficulty.)

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

#627

Post by scaryclam » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #383

salty_biscuits wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with a low bar to tertiary education? It lets disadvantaged kids get in and catch up. As long as the standards are high by the end everything is fine right?

In theory? Nothing at all. In practice, some see the fact many tech employers give coding tests to people with CS degrees as a sign the standards at the end aren't as consistently high as one might hope.

CS isn't programming, so I don't think it's unreasonable to make sure a candidate from a CS background has the basics down.

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

#628

Post by new2628 » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #449

new2628 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It even went further: in Romania, there was a popular movie in the 80s where the main plot is a high school student going to the math olympiad and his classmates cheering for him (with additional romantic threads of course).

Obviously all culture, and certainly mass culture in the Soviet bloc was controlled for "proper social message". I don't suppose Romania was more lax in respect to that? A movie cheering for, or even trivializing anti-social behaviors would find it difficult to go past censorship (not to mention - to be conceived in the first place...) It's for the same reason that you'd be hard-pressed to find a pre-1989 Central/Eas…

Yes, that's a good point, and it was a positive side-effect of Soviet times that intellectual pursuits were valued/supported, especially those that were "pure" enough (math, chess, etc.) to be harmless to the regime.

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

#629

Post by touktouk » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

tragiclos wrote: post #108

julianeon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's worth pointing out here, for Americans who don't know better (no blame implied), that the French have one of the best mathematical pipelines in the world. They have almost as many Nobels (13 vs. 11) despite having 1/5 the population. Guardian article about them here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/31/europa-french-... So please don't think France is a backwater that just doesn't know how…

There is no such thing as a Nobel prize for math.

The strongest plausible interpretation of what the previous comment said is that it refers to the Fields medal, which has been described as the mathematician's Nobel Prize [0]. Assume good faith.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal, second paragraph

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

#630

Post by owl57 » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:39 PM UTC

Loulybob wrote: post #541

Symbiote wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criticism, then, should be directed at Oxbridge, and not at [almost] all other British universities which don't do this. I went to Imperial College. "Work hard, play hard" was some kind of motto. Most people followed the first part, the second part was optional. There was more "play" at weekends, and less during the week, compared with my friends at other universities. Mostly, it meant focussing on work during th…

On your final point about the drinking age: The minimum purchasing/public drinking age is 18 (other than a single pint with a meal), but there's no practical restriction on parents letting their kids drink in private. My parents encouraged me once I was around 16 to join in with the adults whilst they had drinks. This led to me getting silly drunk a couple of times but with proper supervision. Same thing with going t…

In MSU of early 00's most students drank a lot. I certainly did, mostly with other people from schools #2 and #57 already mentioned in this thread. But there was another company with a reputation of "real crazy drunkards". They were from another excellent high school, distinct from the Konstantinov lineage: the Kolmogorov's boarding school. Most of them left parents' house at age of 15.