Astonishing performance (3rd place) by North Korea with pop. around 25m. Not sure what incentives were in place for the contestants.
North Korea placed 4th.[0]
[0] https://www.imo-official.org/year_country_r.aspx?year=2015
USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
81–90 of 112 posts
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#82I looked a bit at the gender distribution for the gold and silver medalists, I would guess only 1 in 10-20 is a girl, most seemed to be from the eastern bloc countries.
It is my privilege to know (just a little) the first United States woman to gain a gold medal at the IMO. I know her mother much better and discuss mathematics education with her online frequently. In all countries, it takes a really sound elementary education in math to gain a chance at qualifying, through repeated rounds of testing that winnow down a national population, for a national team to the IMO. Most of the United States young people I know who have made it onto the United States IMO team have been deeply involved in mathematics competitions at younger age levels for many years, and the young woman whose mother I know was no exception. She was homeschooled for her primary and secondary education. East Asian countries and some eastern European countries seem culturally (compared to the United States) to have much less of a presupposition than many Americans have that girls will not do well in math, and correspondingly more girls in those places do well in math because they stay involved in math.
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#83Russia nowhere to be seen. We used to be a powerhouse too, but it seems the education here is in absolute shambles now.
To be fair, this contest measures the performance of six people. The education that is most directly tied to IMO performance is specific "math for the top few students in the country" stuff which is usually some specialist math camp thing. So I don't think it necessarily means that much about a whole country's math education, if their IMO team doesn't do well.
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
North Korea was caught cheating twice, and is the only country to have been caught cheating at the IMOs so far, so I would take their ranking with a grain of salt. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...
How does one cheat at a test of this sort?
Just being able to communicate among the 6 participants would be enough to make a huge difference. It's like if 6 people took an SAT test together, they'd likely do better than any one could do individually.
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#85it is a good news. because American become more confident in educating their kids in maths and abandon the idea that you can be lawyer if you are not good at math. on the other hand, Chinese can stop believing that math is highest form of intelligence and pursue career as lawyer etc.
??? Wouldn't it be better for mankind ... if as many people like these kids as possible pursued math and science more vigorously ??? Especially kids like these, who have what I would term "creative" intelligence. Why would we want those people in law ??? That gives us far less than having them in math and science. And we will get the MOST by having them in art AND math and science. Then we'd really get their creativi…
IMO, high level Math and Science is generally a waste of a lot of really smart peoples time. The LHC for example is studying particle energy's so far outside of 'reasonable' that we are not going to get useful technology from there. The same is true of a lot of esoteric Math which mostly ends up divorced from anything actually useful.
That's not to say funding such things is necessarily a waste, just the focus on STEM education may be excessive. Russia for example ended up with a lot of highly educated security guards.
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#86congratulation...I see a hedge fund career for many
A good proportion of maths olympians go into mathematics in academia rather than into industry. Industry does need problem solvers, but maths olympians develop creativity and a sense of elegance and beauty as well. Industry requires efficient solutions to technical problems, more than elegant or beautiful ones, at least relative to what is possible with full academic freedom.
My anecdotal experience is that most may start with math for their first degree, but then (or during) pivot to some related but more applied area like CS, Econ, etc.
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#87Not related to this year's competition, but you may also be interested in the hall of fame [1], which contains many well-known names.
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
??? Wouldn't it be better for mankind ... if as many people like these kids as possible pursued math and science more vigorously ??? Especially kids like these, who have what I would term "creative" intelligence. Why would we want those people in law ??? That gives us far less than having them in math and science. And we will get the MOST by having them in art AND math and science. Then we'd really get their creativi…
IMO, high level Math and Science is generally a waste of a lot of really smart peoples time. The LHC for example is studying particle energy's so far outside of 'reasonable' that we are not going to get useful technology from there. The same is true of a lot of esoteric Math which mostly ends up divorced from anything actually useful. That's not to say funding such things is necessarily a waste, just the focus on STE…
I agree. It seems no one is capable of saying that math and science are extremely important while also admitting that advanced math and science are actually not used in the day-to-day lives of most adults. Why is that so hard?
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope not. When I did math Olympiads (including the IMO) I was presented with a false dichotomy of pure math or finance. This is really unfortunate because finance in general does not use very deep math. A tiny number of people might use SDEs but by now the techniques are standard and boring anyway. Furthermore, even mainstream economists doubt that this sort of finance has positive externalities. The amount of reso…
As someone who neglected statistics as a student ( topology was a lot funner) , would you have any recommendations for self-learning tools for statistics?
I also neglected statistics, it seems there's no avoiding it these days. What cured me was a MOOC from edx/MITx called 6.041x. It literally had me close to tears a couple of times. There was carnage, whining and general malaise. I couldn't imagine a better course for persistent programmers who don't know when to quit.
It's been offered during the spring term for the past two years, so maybe Feb 2016 will see the next run.
https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-probability-science-...
Re: USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
#90This makes me want to chant USA a lot more than the soccer game.
or you could learn math & science...way better