Yep, that is why my family moved to the US from Russia. My mom wanted to be a doctor, but wasn't accepted to medical school even though she got straight As and was completely qualified. They just said they can't accept her because she's Jewish, and there is nothing she could do about it. I'm really glad I got to grow up here in America.
Jewish problems
31–40 of 203 posts
Re: Jewish problems
#32Were these questions for entrance from high school or a bachelors program? If the latter, many (say half) of them are acceptable, but if the former then none of them are.
These were for university. This sort of addresses your point: Now, after thirty years, these problems seem easier. Mostly, this is because the ideas of how to solve these problems have spread and are now a part of the standard set of ideas. Thirty years ago these problems were harder to solve and, in addition, the students were given these problems one after another until they failed one of them, at which point they…
I agree that the problems have gotten much simpler - several of these remind me a lot of the difficulty I saw on the AIME back in 10th-12th grade. I mean, that's still pretty advanced relatively speaking, but certainly doable by tens of thousands of high school aged students each year.
And then there's two levels of competition past that I never made it to... just 1... damn... question... short...
Re: Jewish problems
#33When they say 'oral exams', are the applicants expected to shoot out an answer without actually looking at the problem or writing a solution? And if that's the case, how much time would they get to solve these problems mentally? I can't imagine being able to solve any of these without a pen and paper. I would assume that unless you already know the answer, there isn't a way for an 'unwanted' applicant to be able to d…
No - an oral exam in this context is more like a programming interview. You get a board and chalk, and you solve the problem on the board in front of the teacher, explaining what you're doing along the way. This is opposed to a "normal" exam where you have your pen and paper and a pre-set amount of time to struggle with the problem on your own.
It's actualy the latter, followed by the former -- on paper.
Re: Jewish problems
#34I've just browsed the pdf and problem 2 is my favorite.
At least when I was studying there (late 90-s), all entrance exam problems were supposed to be solved without any calculus. The motivation given was that algebra and geometry give enough variety of material for hard and beautiful problems and high school calculus is a joke so they would have to teach it again from scratch.
This problem can be done without any derivatives, actually. First observe that since (x-y)^2=(y-x)^2, we have |F(x)-F(y)|x, divide up the interval between them into x_0=x, x_1, x_2, ..., x_n=y evenly spaced. Then applying the observation above and the triangle inequality, since F(y)-F(x) is the sum of the F(x_(i+1))-F(x_i), we have |F(y)-F(x)|Note that 2 here can be replaced with any number greater than 1; this is actually a well-known fact, that any Hölder-continuous function on the reals with exponent greater than 1 is constant. But I suppose it would not be well-known to high-school students! To be honest, I mostly only know it because of the old legend about the student who... well, here's a link: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/53122/mathematical-urban-l...
Re: Jewish problems
#35Can someone please explain to me what the hell is the problem people have with Jews? The only thing I can tell is maybe they're disproportionately financially successful? I guess that's a problem...
I've also always wondered why a specific group has been so apparently consistently persecuted against for so long. It seems like it's been too long of a time period for the hate to simply have been passed on from generation to generation.
Re: Jewish problems
#36Can someone please explain to me what the hell is the problem people have with Jews? The only thing I can tell is maybe they're disproportionately financially successful? I guess that's a problem...
More so than almost any other culture, Jews have been consistently able to maintain their own cultural identity even when they are in the demographic minority or displaced abroad. A lot of this is due to their willingness to close themselves off from the surrounding population and maintain their own, separate, religious and social structures.
So, from the outside, the local population sees a group of foreigners brought into the country. This group refuses to assimilate, actively shuts strangers out of their group, and maintains a certain aura of secrecy.
This means that the perception of the Jews as "outsiders" never goes away, even several generations after their arrival. Throw the semi-legendary Jewish financial success into the mix, and you fuel suspicion that "those people are up to something."
Re: Jewish problems
#37Yep, that is why my family moved to the US from Russia. My mom wanted to be a doctor, but wasn't accepted to medical school even though she got straight As and was completely qualified. They just said they can't accept her because she's Jewish, and there is nothing she could do about it. I'm really glad I got to grow up here in America.
Similar story: My dad was his high school's valedictorian in Kiev, but couldn't get a spot at a regular university. He ended up getting a degree in 'applied physics' from a night school after his military service. I think he's always regretted not becoming a researcher. My grandfather also did really well in high school, tried to become an archaeologist but it wasn't a common profession in the USSR and university positions were mainly reserved for well connected non-Jews.
Re: Jewish problems
#38Can someone please explain to me what the hell is the problem people have with Jews? The only thing I can tell is maybe they're disproportionately financially successful? I guess that's a problem...
More so than almost any other culture, Jews have been consistently able to maintain their own cultural identity even when they are in the demographic minority or displaced abroad. A lot of this is due to their willingness to close themselves off from the surrounding population and maintain their own, separate, religious and social structures. So, from the outside, the local population sees a group of foreigners broug…
The "locals" still get grumpy even when Jews can't own land or amass much wealth. The pogroms and massacres in Ukraine, Poland, Russia, etc... were generally against very poor communities. On the other hand, Jewish communities were much more financially successful and culturally prominent across the Arab world and seem to have drawn a lot less antipathy.
Re: Jewish problems
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not supposed to be; the goal was to give Jews harder questions which had supposedly simple answers: > One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam. I was told that these problems were carefully designed to have elementary solutions (so that the Department could avoid scandals) that were nearly impossible to find.
They could also give huge boolean formulas, and ask the applicant to decide if it is satisfiable[1] or not. Simple yes or no answer, which is quite a hard (NP-hard) to come by. But then again, it would probably fool nobody. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem
While it is obvious that a satisfiable instance will have a simple yes-certificate, it is not known if for any unsatisfiable instance there is a short no-certificate (i.e. SAT is in NP, but believed not to be in coNP). The Jewish problems had to have simple solutions, while it could be hard to find a small proof of unsatisfiability of some large formula.
Re: Jewish problems
#40Can someone please explain to me what the hell is the problem people have with Jews? The only thing I can tell is maybe they're disproportionately financially successful? I guess that's a problem...
As much as the Soviet Union tried to keep down Jews, they were also trying to promote people who fit a nationalist narrative. So it wasn't just antisemitism, it was also affirmative action for Russians (especially those of peasant descent).