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Math Team

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Re: Math Team

#71

Post by epicfeedback »

inthewoods wrote: post #66

What I'm really curious about is how he got into Stanford, a school that famously no one gets into, given what we know about him. Not to say he's not smart or interesting - he's clearly a good writer - but I don't see what made him stand out to get into that school. I'd be interested to understand that. I've got a freshman in high school - and he's very bright - doing AP Calc now. But he already feels like it's impos…

I don’t know that this is a problem specifically of the US or higher education, just humans. Humans want to have the best, to be the best. There’s only so many “bests”. When competing with millions or billions of other people, the odds you are the best are very low indeed.

I think it was less painful pre-internet, pre-globalization, where you only had to be the best in your town, or your state, and that was pretty dang impressive. Now if you aren’t the best in the world what even are you?

Re: Math Team

#72

Post by lupire »

julianeon wrote: post #63
quax23 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate; I didn't study quite as hard as my peers, didn't get into the prestigious private colleges that they got into (still went to an excellent public school across the Bay from Stanford), studied a fair bit of math, and ended up with a decent job where I've found that my math and problem solving skills have paid dividends. I'm certainly not making tech or F-U money, but I have a comfortable life a few years…

My experience, a few decades later, is that everyone who optimized for STEM and long hours in high school made the right choice. The only downside I’ve seen is some wistfulness about lost romances and the preciousness of childhood. The upside is much higher earning power and greater opportunity later in life. I’d actually be interested in counter examples. In my circle I’m not aware of any, which is different than sa…

Optimizing for STEM is a bit different for optimizing for extreme puzzles. Math Team is a corner of math (not even the main part), and not STE at all. It's a bit of a distraction from learning useful math for S, T, E, and even pure and applied M. One of the choices a math student has to make is whether to pursue advanced caclulus/stats/engineering math, or pure math, or contest puzzles. It's a (hard!) puzzle contest (and those are fun too, but we don't pretend that taking them to an extreme level is relevant to a career).

Re: Math Team

#73

Post by lupire »

gowld wrote: post #47
fortenforge wrote: post #39

The author mentions at one point that he was unable to solve a problem because he didn't memorize the formula for the Euler totient function in order to count the number of numbers relatively prime to 9999. ...but its actually an interesting (and not super difficult) exercise in its own right to figure this out even if you don't know the formula. Encourage you all to give it a shot. SPOILERS: 9999 = 3^2 * 11 * 101, s…

The problem (and linked solution is here) https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2022_AIME_I_P... The totient formula isn't the hard part of the problem. The test has a very short time limit (for the difficulty of the problems), and has many gruelingly complicated problems,so if you dont have the formulas down cold, you'll burn out during the contest. Of course, if you don't care about silly speed-mathing con…

What's especially fascinating is that the core of the problem is a generalization of the totient computation, so understanding the inclusion-exclusion construction of totient is very helpful to the problem, while simply memorizing the formula is a misdirection.

OP missing this point shows that he really was doing this for all the wrong reasons. He should have done FIRST or science bowl instead.

Re: Math Team

#74

Post by [deleted] »

inthewoods wrote: post #66

What I'm really curious about is how he got into Stanford, a school that famously no one gets into, given what we know about him. Not to say he's not smart or interesting - he's clearly a good writer - but I don't see what made him stand out to get into that school. I'd be interested to understand that. I've got a freshman in high school - and he's very bright - doing AP Calc now. But he already feels like it's impos…

[deleted]

Re: Math Team

#75

Post by jhshah »

lupire wrote: post #73
gowld wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem (and linked solution is here) https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/2022_AIME_I_P... The totient formula isn't the hard part of the problem. The test has a very short time limit (for the difficulty of the problems), and has many gruelingly complicated problems,so if you dont have the formulas down cold, you'll burn out during the contest. Of course, if you don't care about silly speed-mathing con…

What's especially fascinating is that the core of the problem is a generalization of the totient computation, so understanding the inclusion-exclusion construction of totient is very helpful to the problem, while simply memorizing the formula is a misdirection. OP missing this point shows that he really was doing this for all the wrong reasons. He should have done FIRST or science bowl instead.

Completely agree, I also liked the problem and thought it was conceptual as far as these things go.

Asking for N mod 1000 was another cute twist that was meant to get you thinking about the divisibility properties of the totient function - "hmm, so (p-1) always divides \phi(n) for all prime factors p of n, how convenient..."

Re: Math Team

#76

Post by lupire »

inthewoods wrote: post #66

What I'm really curious about is how he got into Stanford, a school that famously no one gets into, given what we know about him. Not to say he's not smart or interesting - he's clearly a good writer - but I don't see what made him stand out to get into that school. I'd be interested to understand that. I've got a freshman in high school - and he's very bright - doing AP Calc now. But he already feels like it's impos…

It really shows that admissions is a crapshoot. Also, this story happened 20 years ago.

Regarding your kid: There are 4million US high school graduates each year. MIT admits about 2000.

Sorry for being abrasive, but why is your child crushed that he isn't the very best? Why is it sad that he isn't better than everyone else?

Being upset about not being in the 0.1% as a teenager is tacky. 99.9% of us aren't.

Re: Math Team

#77

Post by lupire »

legerdemain wrote: post #51

I went to a combined middle/high school in a small city of 200,000 in upstate New York, and no one on our Math League team distinguished themselves in any way other than by transferring to another nearby high school that had an actual IB program. At that level of engagement, Math League was all right, just something for a nerdy, unpopular teen to do to break up the monotony of dreary upstate winter evenings. I'm more…

Pretentious magnet/private schools call their Honors-level Calculus class Analysis to pump the egos of their students and parents, and help them cheat on college admissions.

Meanwhile, Harvard calls its honors Real Analysis class "Advanced Calculus".

But on this case it's precalculus. International Baccalaureate also uses "Analysis" to mean precalculus mathematics.

Re: Math Team

#78

Post by lupire »

adelie wrote: post #59

like the author, i burned out on the extracurricular grind necessary to get into an elite college and as a result, spent most of my university years severely depressed. for me, it was debate club. i liked debate, but the form of it i participated in was a rich man's game and i was simply not a rich man. i didn't have the money to fly to the east coast every weekend to attend tournaments or pay people to assemble case…

Math is the cheapest extracurriculal. It's the best!

Re: Math Team

#79

Post by lupire »

neilv wrote: post #52

Great, honest-sounding description of this college application grind, doing things he wasn't interested in, and suggesting that most of the other mathletes also weren't interested in math. Now that he's 15 years into a tech career, I'm wondering what he thinks if/when interviewing applicants, and sees or doesn't see similar grind on the resume. I imagine that some, if they got their position by virtue of the hoop-jum…

You say FAANG but you really mean one specific one of them.

Re: Math Team

#80

Post by lupire »

dexwiz wrote: post #61

In my High School experience I encountered two styles of knowledge competition. Quiz Bowl, which was essentially Jeopardy. And Academic Super Bowl, which was like extra school. Quiz Bowl was full of a ton of smart kids with various interests. We "practiced," but the only skill you could really develop was being able to predict a question before it was finished so you could be the first to answer. Questions varied wid…

I think you reversed "former" and "latter".
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