2016 International Mathematical Olympiad

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If you look at the science journals and such, most American papers are by Mohammeds and Ishikari's and such and not so many William Conrads🙂

Have you personally tried the problems given? I know I would not have a chance of a snowball on Venus🙂

Originally posted by sonhouse
If you look at the science journals and such, most American papers are by Mohammeds and Ishikari's and such and not so many William Conrads🙂

Have you personally tried the problems given? I know I would not have a chance of a snowball on Venus🙂

I read science journals regularly and it definitely not true that "most American papers" are by "Mohammeds and Ishikari's and such." Becoming a scientist requires getting a good education, which in the US is far easier for someone with a privileged background.

Having said that, first authors tend to be PhD students or postdocs, who are often foreigners.

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Referring only to the UK team, I can give a partial explanation. Basically, in the UK immigrants tend to value education more highly. I can't give a very clear explanation for this, but there's an anti-intellectual undercurrent to British society which means the kids tend to enforce "not being teacher's pet" and so on on each other (at least that was true in my day). I remember being told by another child: "It's not what you know, but who you know.", which he'd probably been told by one of his parents or grandparents. So academic failure is forgiven rather than corrected. Coming from a different culture this doesn't apply to immigrants.

I also think the educational establishment latches onto fads, for example for division the current fashion is to teach "lumping and splitting" which is an inferior algorithm they think is more intuitive than long division. Apparently long division is just an algorithm, but so is the lumping and splitting procedure, so all they are doing is teaching a weaker algorithm. When I was a child they were trying to teach us set theory at a quite young age (about 10).

On the other hand, I think that this is improving, partly due to a more sane approach in giving advice to parents on how to encourage their children. Another help is programs like Countdown, where contestants are given a collection of nine letters and have to find the longest possible word, as well as two numbers games where they are given a selection of six numbers and have to combine those numbers using elementary arithmetic operations to find a target number. The adjudicators are Susie Dent, who is able to say what the longest possible word is because she has an encyclopedic knowledge of the dictionary (having been doing the program for around twenty five years) and Rachel Riley who demonstrates the solution to the arithmetic problems, apparently without using a calculator or even pencil and paper, which is available to the contestants (they can't use calculators but do have pencil and paper). She has a 2:1 from Oriel College Oxford. Riley is pretty and blonde, which shouldn't matter, but this helps break down the notion that to be attractive a woman has to be a "dumb blonde". The same applies to Suzie Dent, who is also a graduate of Oxford in modern languages, and has a master's in German from Princeton.

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Are you a mathematical historian or a historical mathematician?

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And by extension from the tone of this post, also you, right? Do you consider yourself retired? You seem to have lived an exceptionally rich and gifted life and I would think you would think total retirement anathema to your life. I think you would just go after other goals. Maybe back to theater? Or never left?

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It's really funny the way you studiously avoid saying what you are, but expounding on what may have been!

It reminds me a bit of the old SNL routine, Pat 🙂

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/its-pat/n10133

I hope you know I mean no disrespect!