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The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

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Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#71

Post by [deleted] »

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #24
Ntrails wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, here's my thinking. The goal of the exams is not to find the children who are middle of the pack. The goal of the exams is to find the outliers. The unusually bright. What I think actually happens is you capture the top 0.1% because they're too smart not to make it, but the other 0.9% of passes is a mixture of highly trained, hard working kids alongside the intended targets. I guess I always wonder what could be…

I've caught the exceptional by being a commited teacher. You notice that they are ahead of the pack, by different signs: some make great questions in class, others barely say a word but utterly ace the exams, others are incredibile driven and tell you about their interests, others aren't, but when challenged they respond with interesting solutions. Of course, that may not be a scalable way to find them. But if you ha…

[deleted]

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#72

Post by philiplu »

commandlinefan wrote: post #46
khazhoux wrote: post #7

I'd love to see recommendations of similarly "powerful" math books in circulation today. And I mean books that actually taught you a ton of math, not books that contain a ton of interesting-looking math but mostly sit unread. Tim Gowers' Princeton Companion to Mathematics comes to mind, but I don't own it and I'm not sure if it's breadth-over-quality.

Not quite math, but TAOCP was like that for me: rather than having to force myself to work through it, I actually looked forward to spending time reading it or working the exercises.

If you think you'd like TAOCP, but with just the math, not the programming (hah), take a look at Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik. I haven't read anything else by Graham or Patashnik, so I don't know how much their voice comes through, but Knuth's playfulness and joy in the material comes through strongly. It's a blast just to read for fun.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#73

Post by random314 »

alex_smart wrote: post #51
nindalf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The beauty of JEE Only a person who did well in JEE would say this. You talk about disadvantages for rural students. This is important, because the vast majority of people in India live in villages or small towns, not the big cities. Tell me though, how many students from villages and small towns do well in JEE without moving to a coaching centre in a bigger town? Personal anecdotes aside, you'll find that urban st…

>Only a person who did well in JEE would say this. Please forgive me for considering, in a country fraught from top to bottom with corruption and casteism, an objective system that offers an opportunity for young, talented students, irrespective of their backgrounds, to devote two years of their lives to serious study and meaningfully transform their lives "beautiful". It MUST be because of my single-digit rank. >Tel…

> irrespective of their backgrounds, to devote two years of their lives to serious study

I don't know how you can make such a statement with a single digit rank.

JEE offers the middle and upper middle class an opportunity to leap into the rich class. What percentage of India is middle class?

How many lower middle class and poor folks can send their kids to kota to study for JEE?

How much would it cost the Indian government to develop detailed coaching videos by IIT professors and upload it for free to YouTube? Yes JEE is a good entrance exam, but let's not romanticize it as something that can cross boundaries of caste and class. If so, we can also claim that capitalism doesn't care about your caste and class either! The harrassment faced by students of lower caste who get in through affirmative action is also well known.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#74

Post by technosamay20 »

alex_smart wrote: post #5
nindalf wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.

>In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer…

I agree with this. Most people need just 2 years during grade 11 and 12. Starting earlier might give minor edge at best but more damage to other aspects of personality and growth!

In IIT, in under 1000 rank, most people who spent more than 2 years were people who were intelligent but didn't take preparation seriously during their grade 11-12 but put in effort after that.

I also know people who were extremely intelligent who could crack under 100 if they gave the exam in grade 8. But they were outliers.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#75

Post by ItsMonkk »

alex_smart wrote: post #63
ItsMonkk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am not Indian and the only thing that I know of this is what I have read here and from having watched 3 Idiots(2009), all metricization is the same. You can not test intelligence, you can only test knowledge. But everyone wants to know intelligence. The examples you cite are finding the farthest distance in their field, and the only people capable of going that distance are people who move fast AND work hard.…

>You can not test intelligence, you can only test knowledge. You absolutely can test for a combination of intelligence and knowledge. >But everyone wants to know intelligence. Seldom do people actually care about intelligence in isolation. What use is intelligence without the discipline and ability to apply yourself towards a goal for a considerable length of time? >As the people who study for a long time keep increa…

I know more about the South Korean system.

They grade to a curve. When the students get better, the test gets harder. Their students spend 16 hours a day studying for their university exams, and start at the age of 12. 46% of students are depressed. Suicide is the leading cause of death in both 10-19 and 20-29 population, mostly due to the stress.

The goal of all students is to pass the test so that they can make it into Seoul University so that Samsung will hire them. The bottleneck is the test. Life afterwards is easy.

Rigorous testing does not give you the best 1% of the population, it filters the people willing to go through the system down to the top 1%. Some of them will be of the .1% best, and others will be those who worked harder as they did not have to help their little sister get home, or their parents clean the restaurant after school.

You can not know your false positives. You can not know your false negatives. Every Einstein born to a poor family who does not get to study is wasted potential to humanity. Every Einstein whose passion is in Machine Learning and spends all of his time on that topic will fail this test.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#77

Post by [deleted] »

nindalf wrote: post #3
xNeil wrote: post #2

It's interesting to note that Ramanujan also completed SL Loney's books on Coordinate Geometry and Trigonometry before he turned 12. These books are today used by almost every aspirant in the IIT-JEE, the engineering entrance exam in India. I'm trying to complete them, they're genuinely wonderful books. I believe they are also available on archive.org, although I use print editions.

For an international audience, the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is more like the Chinese gaokao than the SATs. In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. The stakes are pretty high, and only the top 1% get through. The remaining 99% try to move on with their lives or spend another entire year preparing full time for the exam.

[deleted]

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#78

Post by dataangel »

philiplu wrote: post #72
commandlinefan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite math, but TAOCP was like that for me: rather than having to force myself to work through it, I actually looked forward to spending time reading it or working the exercises.

If you think you'd like TAOCP, but with just the math, not the programming (hah), take a look at Concrete Mathematics by Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik. I haven't read anything else by Graham or Patashnik, so I don't know how much their voice comes through, but Knuth's playfulness and joy in the material comes through strongly. It's a blast just to read for fun.

I must be built differently, I found Concrete Mathematics insanely inapproachable. I have a math stack exchange question where I ask for clarity on WTF he means on one question and got upvotes and comments from his students who were similarly flummoxed taking the course from him in real life!

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#79

Post by valarauko »

random314 wrote: post #73
alex_smart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only a person who did well in JEE would say this. Please forgive me for considering, in a country fraught from top to bottom with corruption and casteism, an objective system that offers an opportunity for young, talented students, irrespective of their backgrounds, to devote two years of their lives to serious study and meaningfully transform their lives "beautiful". It MUST be because of my single-digit rank. >Tel…

> irrespective of their backgrounds, to devote two years of their lives to serious study I don't know how you can make such a statement with a single digit rank. JEE offers the middle and upper middle class an opportunity to leap into the rich class. What percentage of India is middle class? How many lower middle class and poor folks can send their kids to kota to study for JEE? How much would it cost the Indian gove…

> How much would it cost the Indian government to develop detailed coaching videos by IIT professors and upload it for free to YouTube?

I realize this is entirely tangential to the thrust of this sub-thread, but I don't think the government really should be encouraging coaching (with some caveats). The goal of the JEE is to identify the top 1% of applicants, or more accurately the top n number of candidates. In 10 years the JEE might have to pick the top 0.5% of applicants as the population grows and the seats do not. Making the JEE more equitable doesn't change that - more seats aren't created to meet demand. The difficulty of the JEE has to scale & adapt to the level of the students who appear in the exam. Yes, coaching classes can teach tricks that exploit weak patterns within the JEE. I would much rather see the JEE continually redesigned to be resistant to coaching in general.

Re: The Textbook That Unleashed Ramanujan's Genius

#80

Post by fizwhiz »

xNeil wrote: post #23
alex_smart wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In my day it took 4 years of preparation starting age 14. Nowadays kids start at 11 or earlier. That's more due to Indian coaching companies preying on Indian's parents' extreme sense of desperation and FOMO for their children rather than any real need to start that early. I don't think any more than two years are required or recommended for preparation of the exam. The longer you stretch the preparation, the longer…

Hi! I'm a JEE aspirant - is there any way I could contact you to have a bit of a chat? Of course, only if you're kind enough to accept - I'll understand if you don't, however :)

I hate to be that guy, but this isn't Quora my guy.
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