[HN Gopher] Math Team
___________________________________________________________________
Math Team
Author : carabiner
Score : 112 points
Date : 2023-12-20 00:58 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (benexdict.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (benexdict.io)
| gumby wrote:
| What a horrifying existence. The author recognized the problem,
| "The problem with doing something pointless for accolades is that
| you have to do so much of it, for so much longer than you expect"
| but what were the consequences? Are they happy now?
|
| BTW MIT doesn't do legacies.
| carabiner wrote:
| He basically says "yes" at the end. Got an awesome job and
| career and became part of a tech power couple with his wife he
| met freshman year, all because of his high school struggles. In
| current late stage capitalism, I think this is the best outcome
| you can reasonably seek. You're either in the elite or
| scrounging around, reposting memes about doordashing mcdonalds
| and having too many roommates. I wish I had followed the path
| of OP. I encourage gen alpha, gen z to strive for OP's path,
| optimizing for income, in order to have a happy life with food,
| secure shelter, healthcare, and a retirement life. Increasingly
| it's just the haves and have-nots. The middle is crumbling away
| and you must maximize income potential in order to have a
| decent life.
|
| I think a lot about a meme I saw: "I'm a therapist, and while
| therapy is great, what I think what most people need is money."
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| The problem with your suggestion is that it implicitly
| suggests death for loser commoners, of which there will
| always statistically be more. The loser commoners need some
| way to ensure their basic needs are met, or they find a way
| to do that anyways. For example, see all the "eat the rich"
| rhetoric. I don't think there's anything wrong with
| suggesting that people should try to make the most of what
| they have, but suggesting that you need math skills or a
| Stanford degree to be guaranteed basic human needs or rights
| is a shortsighted perspective that doesn't account for the
| variety of human experience, eventually leading to
| surmounting misery for others. For anyone with a
| consequentialist pov, consider this: increasing societal
| misery only leads to broken communal structures, and failures
| in social contracts (implicit or otherwise). Simply, more
| poor and sad people = more chances of societal unrest = less
| safe society for everyone (including elites).
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| Great. So is your suggestion that high school students
| should focus on politics and building an equitable society
| instead of optimizing for themselves? That would be very
| altruistic indeed.
| lusus_naturae wrote:
| I guess we've come far enough from being hunter-gatherers
| that the value of acts that ensure group cohesion and
| community wellbeing seem like some sort of extra effort
| or altruism, instead of a fundamental aspect of
| optimizing survival as a whole. That said, I was talking
| about governance and policies, not what career choices
| someone should or could make.
| carabiner wrote:
| In the US at least, you're most likely to effect systemic
| change by having a lot of money.
| zeitgeistcowboy wrote:
| In the 4th paragraph he describes "the arc of a stone falling to
| earth" as an exponential function. Is that true? I always thought
| it was quadratic.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Yeah that jumped out to me too
| joaogui1 wrote:
| He did say he's not a mathematician
| jackhalford wrote:
| I can confirm, in classical mechanics, flat gravitional fields
| give paths that follow quadratic trajectories.
| markisus wrote:
| Solutions to linear differential equations are exponentials,
| and this may be what the author meant. In a state space model,
| we can write Newton's law under gravity if we let y(t) = [x(t),
| x'(t)]^T, let A = [ 0, 1; 0 0], let b = [0, -g]^T, and set
| y'(t) = A y(t) + b.
|
| Indeed, the solution is y(t) = exp(A t) (y0 + int_0^t exp(-As)
| b ds).
|
| In Einstein's theory, we have a generalization which says a
| stone's path through space-time follows a geodesic of the
| metric. In differential geometry, the exponential function, by
| definition, sends tangent vectors to geodesic curves.
|
| So the author is right, under this interpretation.
| gowld wrote:
| He also wrote that the angels in a triangle sum to 180^0 :-)
| aleyan wrote:
| Went to the same school, was on the same math team, but was a
| year ahead of the author. Quit math team in my junior year
| because I wasn't at a competitive level, but it was a great time
| while I was on it. As a SWE, I rarely get to exercise the
| tenacity and problem solving skills I learned on the math team,
| but when I do they are "transformative" to the rest of the team.
|
| > Nights were for other worthless extracurriculars to pad out our
| applications. ... The worst part was knowing that it was all
| going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form,
| that a committee would review for about ninety seconds
|
| This is the tail wagging the dog; work really hard for 4 years in
| HS so that the next 4 years will be spent at a comparatively more
| prestigious college. I don't think we should expect high school
| students to be able to optimize this correctly themselves, and
| from my experience guidance counselors weren't particularly
| helpful. College admissions feel like a local maxima that have a
| lot of unintended side effects but would be difficult to change.
|
| Personally, I didn't do the extracurriculars that would look good
| for college, but rather the ones I enjoyed; I didn't study very
| hard either. Didn't get into Stanford or an Ivy, but I look upon
| my experience in high school/college fondly rather than bitterly.
| Life seems to have turned out ok too.
| quax23 wrote:
| 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 out of
| college and I'm lucky that I didn't have to sacrifice my youth
| or my interests to get here.
|
| It's also interesting to follow the trajectories of people who
| were in the group that over-optimized for outcomes but have
| fallen off that path. I think the author was able to mitigate
| his burnout (I presume he had a good tech career), but I know a
| fair amount of folks with good pedigrees who haven't, and are
| still in limbo (unemployed, underemployed, or taking an
| extended break early in their career/schooling). I know they
| have the potential to do great things, but it seems the stakes
| of burnout are much higher today and harder to recover from
| financially.
| stocknoob wrote:
| Excellent read. The danger of deferring gratification is that you
| become a subconscious master of it.
| DalekBaldwin wrote:
| High school, at least as far as it serves as a sorting mechanism
| for top students, follows a kind of Parkinson's law: the number
| of hoops to jump through increases until it reaches the natural
| limit of how little sleep the top students can handle.
|
| There were rumblings that my high school, which had plenty of AP
| classes already, was about to introduce a combination AP/IB
| curriculum, which absolutely terrified us. I and my AP-taking
| classmates breathed a huge sigh of relief when it was announced
| that it would be delayed, and the students in the year below us
| would be the guinea pigs. They would have to run twice as fast
| just to stay in place.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| Indeed. In my time, it wasn't uncommon to have 6 AP classes a
| semester along with at least one time-intensive
| extracurricular. Assuming each class is the equivalent of 3
| credit hours, it's the equivalent of an above average number of
| classes in college (15 being the expected amount, 12 being the
| minimum to be a full-time student, and 18 considered intensive)
| while playing a competitive sport.
|
| The best part: Even a decade ago, the above was considered
| neccesary but not sufficient for admission to a top school.
| Plenty of people with perfect to near-perfect college entrance
| exams, Intel International Science and Engineering Fair
| finalists, etc didn't make the cut. Of the few that did, the
| majority were the lower Ivy's (Dartmouth and Brown).
| wjnc wrote:
| There is a book called "Seven checkmarks" in Dutch that
| argues that succes in the Netherlands is strongly correlated
| to seven checkmarks to have: male, highly educated parents,
| white, certain type of elite high school, university educated
| and one more. Having all the marks, having generally
| underperformed academically and still coming out on top
| comparatively I feel there might be some truth in it. It
| would signal a quite stratified society with a "ruler class"
| inside a society that thinks of itself as classless for the
| last 60 years at least. (It's pretty hard to reason about
| this being while being under scrutiny.)
|
| Why post this? After reading your comment I thought wouldn't
| want to live there or raise children there. But the second
| thought was, wait - that's meritocracy in action. Imperfect
| meritocracy as you point out, but it might still be more
| equitable not than having seven checkmarks and generally
| faring worse than those born under a different star. My
| Rawlsian self thinks grit should be rewarded more than birth,
| even though testing for grit would probably massively
| increase burnout.
|
| Thinking even further, I don't think that societies with
| "high grit" (Korea, US) are generally considered to treat
| their children and general society very equitable. Still
| mentally debating if there is a very socialist argument
| growing inside of me. That book (read it three months ago)
| does make me think a lot. It was the first time something
| 'near-woke' made me think so hard. The book mentions the
| reflective point as well - might I only take it that
| seriously because it was written by someone from the same
| "class"? Foundational stuff.
| ska wrote:
| My own path through related stuff is unusual, so nothing like the
| authors. I do however have experience working with and teaching
| people who were on very similar paths to theirs.
|
| There are a huge number of kids in this authors shoes, ones who
| are on a treadmill and not entirely sure why. There are also lots
| of kids who were always the best at something (in this case math)
| that any of their teachers etc. had ever seen ... until they move
| across the country and find themselves in a classroom where they
| are middling at best. And sure, there are rare kids who are so
| good it catches you off guard.
|
| FWIW I suspect there are more kids made miserable than those who
| thrive, but I think it's largely unavoidable in a tournament
| system like "elite" college apps. There are also plenty of kids
| who had some fun and made some friends along the way without
| taking it too seriously. I suspect in this case it's often a good
| outlook in high school, especially for kids who don't really fit
| in anywhere else.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I'm from Scandinavia, and I always find it both fascinating _and_
| alien how much focus the US system puts on extracurriculars - and
| more specifically competitive extracurricular activities.
|
| On one side, it is probably good to motivate pupils to aim for
| something, and get good at it - but on the other side, you
| obviously end up with a bunch of kids that are just really good
| at grinding away - even if their heart is not there. And must
| become some obligatory thing, because everyone else is doing it.
|
| FWIW, over here academics is the only thing that maters. There
| are no entrance exams, no personal letter, no letter of
| recommendation, no extracurricular activities. Your GPA is the
| only thing that maters.
|
| (Of course, that also has its downsides. People end up re-taking
| HS exams year after year, because someone beat their GPA with a
| decimal point.)
| sinkwool wrote:
| > I always find out both fascinating and alien how much focus
| the US system puts on extracurriculars
|
| One factor could be that, AFAIU, schools in US have many more
| electives than in Europe. As a student you have the choice to
| take more advanced classes for one subject, and only basic in
| other subjects, whereas in Europe, the curriculum is standard
| for all. So Universities in US need to compare performance on
| different axes.
|
| > Of course, that also has its downsides. People end up re-
| taking HS exams year after year, because someone beat their GPA
| with a decimal point.
|
| Another downside to the one-size-fits-all standard curriculum,
| is that it forces you to care about classes that you don't
| really care about, while not being able to focus on the
| subjects that you're really interested in. I think in US, if
| you're really good at something, universities may ignore
| average-to-poor performance in other areas.
| carabiner wrote:
| Not everyone else is doing it. OP article is about the top 1%
| of high school students with elite ambitions. In your country,
| this might be like highlighting an Olympian's training vs. your
| average recreationist. The vast, vast majority of US students
| go to university with acceptance rates of 50% or higher where
| your GPA is the determinant.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I mean, the elite students here end up doing pretty much the
| same thing as elite students in US: They become medical
| doctors, investment bankers, management consultants for MBB,
| hedge fund and private equity, and what have you. But I guess
| we don't have to jump through the same amount of hoops to get
| accepted.
|
| With that said, we have around 20 universities and colleges
| in Norway, versus the thousands you have in the US - so I
| would imagine that elite employers in the US rely more on
| colleges/universities for the filtering part, which in turn
| filter HS students. A whole lotta filtering going on, it
| would seem.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's so elite institutions can avoid admitting only Asian
| students.
| fatnoah wrote:
| Interesting. Maybe I'm significantly older (graduated high school
| in the early 90's) than the poster, but math team was a big deal
| at my high school. So much so that my school fielded 3 teams (A,
| B, and C) for regional competitions. At local meets, A and B
| teams typically always came in first and second respectively,
| with C (only a partial team) coming in third or fourth. A team
| also won the state championships twice.
|
| In general, it was pretty low key. Local meets were every month
| or so, practice was about 2 hours a week, though we did more for
| states. At no point did I think about the impact on my college
| admissions, and I don't recall it coming up in conversation with
| anyone else.
|
| (warning: humblenrag) In fact, the only real negative memory I
| have was that the individual high scorers got graphing
| calculators until the year I had the high score and got a
| calculus textbook. Of course, when I got to college and had to
| pay for textbooks, I learned that the calculus text probably was
| more expensive than the calculator.
| noqc wrote:
| The author writes a decent essay, but the claims that he makes
| about the mathematics curriculum don't really line up with my own
| experience of the subject, and I suspect has nothing to do with
| his actual trauma.
|
| This passage sticks out to me:
|
| >I kept getting put into advanced mathematics classes while
| missing core concepts from previous years.... Eventually I was in
| classes with no standard curriculum at all, classes that had
| names like Discrete Mathematics and Advanced Topics II. To this
| day I have no idea what level of math they were meant to
| correspond to.
|
| I don't know how an adult who has spent so much time actually
| trying to learn mathematics can maintain the hallucination that
| math is organized into "levels". The lack of a standard
| curriculum is an actual fucking blessing. God forbid someone
| except for the bureaucrats at pearson/macmillan and whatever
| federal committee decides on the standard curriculum for K-12 get
| to plan a math course. The author's opinion on this is backwards.
|
| Moreover, he wasn't "lacking the core concepts" needed to take on
| these elementary topics, because there aren't any. That's the
| point. Math is built from nothing.
|
| Second, you can feel the resentment in the author's voice when he
| talks about his friend who became a mathematician of sorts. And
| that resentment is that his friend is actually interested in
| mathematics. This is an interesting insight, but it's unrelated
| to his thesis.
|
| We can gain more insight into the author's world view by
| considering some of his other essays. In "Math Team", he lists an
| impressive set of extra curriculars, but for some reason shies
| away from the mention of his church. However in [1] we see the
| following:
|
| >Church was a big time commitment for us. We had prayer meetings
| on Tuesday night, Friday night youth group, Sunday services and
| Sunday school, and then Bible study later at night.
|
| This is an altogether different account of how his time was spent
| as a youth. Maybe it's important to the author not to place
| anything online which would cause conflict with his parents, but
| it seems to me that the obvious _thing putting too much pressure
| on his childhood time_ is this.
|
| This essay on church is generally full of contradictions as well,
| for instance:
|
| > [Church] makes it hard to be honest. In church we valued having
| deep, personal conversations with each other, but it felt like
| people always held something back.
|
| followed not two paragraphs later by the exact opposite claim:
|
| > It's easier to trust a group of people if you know that you are
| all committed to the same things.
|
| In [2], the author concludes with a summary of what he believes
| faith to be:
|
| >Faith is not a process for choosing what to believe in or what
| to commit to. It is a tool for helping with what comes next.
| Creeping doubt and regression to status quo is natural, even in
| the absence of any new evidence. Faith is the virtue of
| counteracting that regression, through repeated internalization
| of those truths and commitments.
|
| The conclusion I draw from this collection of essays, is that the
| author knows exactly what was wrong, but considers it a virtue to
| lie to themselves about it. Perhaps denying your natural doubts
| can sometimes be good for you, but to me it sounds a lot more
| like the spike protein on the mind virus of Christianity wreaking
| havoc. Regardless, if you're not willing to engage with your
| doubts, then you have no business putting your thoughts into an
| essay under the pretense of intellectual honesty.
|
| 1: https://www.benedict.one/2020/12/09/church-and-community/ 2:
| https://www.benedict.one/2020/03/02/faith/
| akprasad wrote:
| The author mentions "dropping [his] religion" here [1], which
| undercuts the idea that he is lying to himself about his
| religious doubts.
|
| I don't think much good comes from analyzing a private stranger
| in this way, especially given such limited evidence.
|
| [1]: https://benexdict.io/p/uncertainty-and-marriage
| noqc wrote:
| I didn't claim that the author is still "religious". I
| claimed that the author maintains the importance of "faith".
| This is the same thing as being religious, of course, but
| without the specifics.
|
| He is publicly making an argument that math team is dull and
| bad. The argument is based in the evidence of his personal
| experience, and the philosophy with which he approached this
| math team is _very important context_ that he has left out,
| which undermines his claim.
|
| He's also not a private stranger. He has 1500 followers on
| twitter, and an extensive blog about his personal life.
| sfink wrote:
| Nice take-down, and I appreciate the points you raise, but
| isn't
|
| > if you're not willing to engage with your doubts, then you
| have no business putting your thoughts into an essay under the
| pretense of intellectual honesty.
|
| kind of talking about every essay, ever? The only people free
| from doubt are on ventilators and definitely aren't writing a
| lot of essays. The very act of writing an essay is engaging
| with (a few of) your doubts. And if you're writing it for
| others to read, you're painting it over with some level of
| pretense.
|
| Just because he's not engaging with your personal hobby horse
| of uncritically accepted Christianity doesn't mean he doesn't
| have something to say. Show me a being with a pure mind, free
| of any self-contradiction or self-avoidance.
|
| Really, please do, so I can pet it and make it wag its tail.
|
| > the author knows exactly what was wrong, but considers it a
| virtue to lie to themselves about it.
|
| As do we all. Only the topic varies.
| noqc wrote:
| >kind of talking about every essay, ever?
|
| Absolutely not. Only the bad ones. An essay is an argument
| with yourself. If you take the explicit position that you
| should ignore your doubts, as this author does, then what you
| are putting on paper is your personal confirmation bias.
|
| My hobby horse is not christianity, my hobby horse is the
| thing that he has insanely distilled from christianity as the
| part worth keeping. The author had a bad experience as a teen
| applying to elite colleges for no other reason than because
| he was supposed to, and the conclusion he _should_ be drawing
| from this observation is so obvious that you might not even
| notice that he doesn 't.
| qrian wrote:
| The high school math Olympiad team is the fondest memory of mine.
| It was like solving puzzle games every day. But I guess if you
| are forced into puzzle games when you don't like it can be a
| torture. I also changed my career to tech but I still look fondly
| back into the days when I could be immersed into solving problems
| without getting pulled into various meetings.
| qsort wrote:
| Same. Not American so perhaps the experience is different
| across the ocean, but it was truly magical. As an awkward,
| weird kid that didn't really know what to do with himself it
| was life changing.
|
| My former team is still alive and going strong, and after uni I
| went back as a coach. I still hear the same stories about how
| awesome the group is, and how kids that now are in the same
| position as I was find it a "safe space", if you will.
| paladin314159 wrote:
| Although I empathize with the struggle of the journey, having
| gone through a similar path of math team -> Stanford (where I
| briefly ran into the author), I think this is a particularly
| uncharitable characterization of math competitions.
|
| Yes, there are many students (even more these days) that are in
| the grind for the accolades and college admissions, but math
| competitions were genuinely my favorite part of high school. They
| helped hone my problem solving, grit (!), work ethic, social
| skills, and leadership skills in a way that I continue to see pay
| off 15 years later. I am forever grateful for my high school
| teacher who supported me during this time.
|
| It helped that I was actually passionate about it, which I think
| is the underlying point here. Weird constructs like math
| competitions that help kids channel their passions? Incredible.
| Forced hoop-jumping for the purpose of college admissions?
| Horrible.
| 33a wrote:
| The author sounds burnt out and bitter. I get that he tried
| really hard and didn't quite make it as far as he wanted, but
| this reads like he's holding onto a lot of resentment for no good
| reason.
|
| My experience with doing competitive math and programming stuff
| was generally quite enjoyable even though I never did the best or
| made it to an ivy league school. I'd still encourage any kid
| who's at all interested to try them out. Solving puzzles is fun!
| Who cares if learning number theory is "useless". So are video
| games, football and chess.
| sailorganymede wrote:
| I think the problem the author is referring to is it stopped
| being about Math and much more about impressing random
| strangers for the chance to gain an opportunity.
|
| My experience is similar to you - I too really enjoyed my time
| doing these activities but once everything I ever enjoyed
| started becoming brownie points for my college applications,
| the competition started becoming "Grind X tasks and Y patterns
| so you can make the grade! Cause if you don't solve this in 14
| minutes, then that kid will and he'll get your position!"
| cl3misch wrote:
| > What would that be like, I wondered, as his words floated
| gently through the space above my head, to just be interested in
| something, not as a stepping stone or as a resume line, but just
| to sit down and count the paths, just because you wanted to know
| how many there were?
|
| Not that great, necessarily. Sometimes I wish that I could simply
| be happy with a "normal" job that pays the bills. Instead of
| feeling like I have to pursue an academic career, just to be able
| to work on the problems I am interested in.
| blauditore wrote:
| The whole concept of "getting into X" especially in American
| education is ridiculous. It shows how unhealthy the system is if
| you can't trust someone's degree if they haven't been to some
| "elite" college.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I wouldn't blame the education system as much as I'd blame
| industry in this case, actually. The problem is companies that
| are too big for their britches: Most of the time, you don't
| need the best of the best. You need someone who will show up on
| time, get the work done, and not turn out to be so abrasive
| that they alienate the rest of your team. Most companies are
| not working on hard problems, they're not even working on
| tricky problems. They're just working on the remaining
| problems. Average should be adequate, and that's what average
| schools produce.
|
| Of course, some places are working on genuinely hard problems.
| They need outstanding individuals, and these are what elite
| schools offer: They've already done the filtering, ensuring
| that the very highest performing individuals disproportionately
| possess one of their diplomas. The elite school may or may not
| have the greatest instructors, but regardless the students will
| get a superior education simply due to the fact that they are
| embedded in an environment that surrounds them with outstanding
| talent.
|
| In this way what university you went to acts a signifier as to
| your abilities, not just how much you know, but how rapidly
| you're able to learn new things, and how much work you're
| willing to put in.
| dexwiz wrote:
| It's because there are enough rich people who only want to hire
| Ivy League graduates. Not for any fact other than everyone
| around them that is Ivy League tells them its the best place to
| hire from.
| 3523582908 wrote:
| wow, i really empathized with this
|
| i was so burnt out upon entering MIT, and now i regret not taking
| a gap year or something. i feel like i missed out on a great
| learning opportunity
|
| thank you for writing this. you opened a bit of a window into my
| past i haven't really processed
| TraceWoodgrains wrote:
| The author and I have discussed this elsewhere, but we had
| dramatically different experiences with competitive math, and I
| think part of the key is that he experienced it as a part of the
| college admissions grind, while I experienced it as an escape
| from the classroom to go do cool puzzles.
|
| My major takeaway from his article was "The things we do in the
| high-stakes holistic admissions structure we've set up are
| insane" more than anything to do with competition math in
| specific.
| tbihl wrote:
| Interestingly, his takeaway seems to be that it was probably
| all worth it.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I did mathcounts and math team stuff in middle school/HS and it
| never once occurred to me that the goal was to get into a good
| college. It just seemed fun.
|
| I wasn't great at it, but I was pretty good considering that I
| didn't get any training, and I always thought it would have felt
| amazing to actually get good at those tests and feel like a math
| wizard. I guess I'm a bit bitter about it; it's a shame the
| special opportunities go to people who are depressingly minmaxing
| instead of people who would really love to have them. Although I
| also know that at some level if I had 'resolved' to get good I
| could have, so I can't be too resentful.
| lapcat wrote:
| > A mathlete is someone who participates in math competitions. He
| (almost always he)
|
| That wasn't my experience. But FWIW I went to a public high
| school.
|
| My friend (her) and I (he) both got accepted into an elite
| school, but we both had to go state colleges, because our
| families couldn't afford to send us. This was decades ago, when
| they didn't give out as many need-based grants.
| fortenforge wrote:
| 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, so first subtract out the
| multiples of 3 (3333 of them), the multiples of 11 (909 of them),
| the multiples of 101 (99 of them). Note that we've now double-
| subtracted multiples of 33 (303 of them), multiples of 303 (33 of
| them), multiples of 1111 (9 of them) so add these back. Finally
| subtract 1 to not count 9999 itself.
|
| phi(9999) = 9999 - 3333 - 909 - 101 + 33 + 303 + 9 - 1 = 6000
|
| I guess my point is that the purpose of these problems is not to
| separate out people who know specific tricks from people who
| don't--its to separate out people who can reason their way
| through difficult mathematical problems and people who can't.
| chongli wrote:
| The difference for you is that you're doing it as a fun
| exercise. With contest math, you're drilling these formulas and
| tricks so you can reproduce them quickly on a timed exam. If
| you know both of the facts listed in the essay then you can
| knock off this question in a minute or two.
|
| Trying to come up with everything from scratch could take a lot
| longer and be very frustrating when you've got other problems
| waiting for you to solve.
| gowld wrote:
| 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
| contests, you can enjot the problems at a leisurely pace.
| stefanpie wrote:
| This personal account resonated with me since I also had some
| personal experiences in both the "math competition" and
| "competitive high school" world up until I graduated high school
| in ~2018.
|
| ---
|
| I went to a middle school where I somehow ended up far ahead in
| the curriculum due to my own interest in science and math, thanks
| to my personal interests and parental support at the time. I
| think I caught the attention of my math teachers and got to
| participate in a county-wide middle school math competition with
| some other students at my school. It was cool, and I wasn't, and
| still am not, a super competitive person, so I thought it was a
| fun experience to try; I don't think we won anything significant.
| I also think I took an AIME-style competition exam (sit-down
| test), but I don't remember much about it. All of this was cool
| but not super interesting to me at the time.
|
| Some wise teacher or fellow parent at the time must have tipped
| off my parents about Math Circles, and I am incredibly grateful
| that my parents took me there. Math circles (at least in my
| experience) are like local meetups for younger (usually non-
| college) students to go and learn about cool exploratory and
| advanced (non-standard curriculum) math topics from college
| students and professors. I used to be so excited to go on
| Saturdays to math circles and sit and watch an old professor from
| a local college teach topics like logic, number theory, advanced
| geometry, and other math topics that were definitely not taught
| in my middle school. I also distinctly remember that I loved the
| exploratory side of the math circles as opposed to competitive
| math where I felt like I wouldn't learn anything and I had to get
| everything correct. If you have kids who are curious about math
| or even science, nature, and art, I would highly look into
| whether there are Math Circles in your local area and at least
| try it out. Some of my fondest memories during this time are from
| Math Circles.
|
| I somehow ended up getting a full scholarship to attend a local
| (non-religious) private school with one of the top competitive
| high school math teams in the nation (among other
| extracurriculars like debate, model UN, ...). The summer school
| started there, and I won't forget when I went to the information
| sessions for the math competition team. The "vibe" was very off
| as soon as I walked in and not what I was expecting. The
| competitiveness was very evident in your attendance and
| performance in the multiple-times-a-week after-school math
| competition classes, how the best get to be on the A and B teams,
| and so on. I think I walked into it with the preconceived notion
| that I was going to get to learn more math for fun by joining the
| math team (like I did in math circles), but my naive worldview
| was very much shattered. I think I attended one of the local math
| competition events that first semester of high school and took
| one of the sit-down style tests, but there was no way I scored
| any kind of decent amount to be considered for anything related
| to math competition at that school. I also had one good close
| friend who stuck with math competition for the four years of high
| school, and so I got to get an idea of what that was like, and it
| was just as crazy as I thought it would be the whole time. I am
| actually grateful for him since I also got to talk to that friend
| about a lot of cool advanced math topics before I took those math
| classes, as well as help me learn enough of the math ahead of
| time to take the advanced AP physics classes (the electricity and
| magnetism one) that I had genuine interest in.
|
| Luckily, by my second year, I was able to land on "science
| research" (think liek a really competitive science fair, e.g.,
| ISEF) as a nice extracurricular I enjoyed. Even in that, you
| cannot escape the competitive nature of it, but there are
| alternative ways to branch out on your own (real publication,
| working with local colleges and professors, just being able to
| say I completed this cool research project and made this cool
| thing) and put something on your "college resume" without having
| to pigeonhole yourself into competing against other students all
| the time. I did have to cycle through some other extracurriculars
| (model UN and FRC robotics) where I "crashed and burned" before I
| finally landed on one where I would feel "safe" in a sense to
| enjoy what I was doing with research.
|
| Finally, the big push from the school onto the students to get
| into the most prestigious schools they can get into really led to
| some weird dynamics among students and really unhealthy kinds of
| stress and anxiety to cope with. I think (but memories are fuzzy)
| that I was able to dodge a lot of that just by the nature of not
| being super competitive, but there were many students who would
| lose their minds if they didn't get above a 90% on an exam in an
| AP level class, as in genuinely freak out and stress over it and
| then go to the teacher and try to sort it out. Any grade that
| would jeopardize their perception of being smart or getting the
| highest GPA possible to get into the best schools possible was an
| anxiety and stress-inducing nightmare for them. There was very
| much an idea that "I'm not going to tell everyone else what I got
| on an exam" to also hide class rankings and your own GPA. I'm
| also sure that none of us got any healthy amount of sleep needed;
| there were people pushing insane courseloads with all AP classes
| to pad their "college resumes." I remember taking some
| architecture classes instead, which I found much more fulfilling
| and fun, and then feeling out of place trying to talk to some of
| my other classmates at the time who were trying to min-max their
| GPA and college applications.
|
| ---
|
| Not to ramble on for too long, I just want to give an idea to
| some readers of another related personal perspective on this
| topic. Having been in some related environments in middle school
| and high school, I can really empathize with some of the genuine,
| agonizing, and sometimes lighthearted in hindsight, moments the
| author experienced. I can't imagine what it's like in 2023/2024,
| or even having kids in the future, what high school education
| will be like. Can students really find peace and comfort to just
| learn and pursue what interests them the most?
|
| Quick epilogue: I did apply to all the prestigious schools that
| everyone else applied to (bless my parents for covering all the
| unnecessary application fees), but also thanks to my parents'
| pragmatism, I applied to some strong schools for engineering. I
| ended up down the Ph.D. route, and the exploratory open-endedness
| aspect of research is still what keeps me excited and happy in my
| day-to-day work.
| ByHookOrCrook wrote:
| well you obviously weren't THAT far ahead since you went to
| George Tech University instead of MIT or otherwise
|
| The author went to Stanford so what he experienced is 1000x
| whatever you are talking about
| ByHookOrCrook wrote:
| Why does this guy act like he's so successful and genius? He
| should feel bad that even though he graduated Stanford back in
| 2009, he's only a senior software engineer at a random non-FAANG
| company.
| gowld wrote:
| There's no evidence that being on the math team helped his
| application.
|
| The people who win the math contests (And yes, who get into elite
| schools because of it) enjoy practice. That's the secret. Tao
| says the same thing about research mathematicians.
|
| The people who hate it don't do well and it doesn't help their
| college applications.
|
| He mentions that he was the only one on high school team who
| discovered how to triangulate a polygon, which is taught in
| Geometry class (junior high school for him).
|
| Their bad attitude drags the team down.
| legerdemain wrote:
| 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 interested in this "Analysis II" the author mentions
| taking in his freshman year. "Analysis II" at the undergraduate
| level usually refers to a proof-based course on real-valued
| functions of several variables. Basically, a retread of Calculus
| III with a more rigorous foundation. But the author never
| mentions any mathematical results from calculus and beyond, and
| I'm under the impression that grade-school math competitions only
| target subjects in arithmetic, elementary combinatorics, and
| classical geometry.
| ianbicking wrote:
| In my high school the order of classes was, if I remember:
| Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II/Trig, Analysis. Calculus was
| still "after" high school at that time (early 90s), though
| starting to become common. So Analysis was kind of pre-
| calculus, a variety of different subjects that weren't quite
| calculus. I remember bits of algebra, probability, compound
| interest, etc. We didn't have Analysis I/II, but the boundaries
| between Algebra and Analysis were so vague that it is easy to
| imagine some split it differently.
|
| It seems quite unlikely the author was referring to Real
| Analysis! Still I can't find nearly any reference to high
| school Analysis (except https://calcworkshop.com/math-
| analysis/), so I'm guessing that terminology is nearly gone
| now.
| neilv wrote:
| 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-jumping grind, would think that the grind was positive
| signal for a candidate for that kind of position. But I don't
| know how common that belief is.
|
| Reason I'm wondering... The last time I did a call with a FAANG
| recruiter (for Staff/Principal SWE), they did something new,
| running down a long list of checkboxes, and asking me for each
| one whether I had it or not. Most of it sounded like college
| application fodder, like people get coached to do in affluent
| prep schools, including multiple checkboxes about mathlete
| competitions. Not something that I would've thought would still
| matter for someone with a big industry track record. Was
| gathering this college app grind data _for experienced
| candidates_ a new thing, or have recruiters and resume-scanning
| software been filling out these properties of each candidate for
| a long time?
| jimbokun wrote:
| I would want to find applicants more like the one mathlete who
| was still doing mathematics past school years because he found
| it deeply interesting.
|
| Then transferring that innate problem solving drive and aiming
| it towards the problems and challenges facing the company.
| neilv wrote:
| I would be curious about that person, too, but devil's
| advocate...
|
| How do you know you can aim that person's drive for math
| towards company problems?
|
| Unless and until you know that, is it more positive signal to
| look for people who, well, have solved company problems?
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I don't like name dropping the school I went to but I didn't have
| the same high school experience as this writer. All of my peers
| at my school seemingly did though which made me feel very behind
| and out of place. I definitely noticed that a lot of the students
| in the CS program already knew a good amount of discrete
| mathematics when we took our 'first' proofs class. In fact, most
| of the other kids went to really highly ranked high schools,
| competed on math or programming or science teams, and had a lot
| of accomplishments but it also simultaneously seemed
| performative. I didn't even know competitive math was a thing
| until I got to campus. I resented my parents for not pushing me
| into all these extra-curriculars so I could be like everyone else
| on campus and have things to brag about. But from the author's
| experience there is a downside to being pushed into these things
| too.
|
| Although the playing ground was actually fair and hard work gets
| you on even footing, I have a couple of things to say about
| college admissions. I will definitely say that although the top
| universities claim to be meritocratic, I don't think they are.
| Most of these students, maybe all now, are kind of acculturated
| into this college admissions process where from a young age you
| are doing STEM competitions and building letters of rec. A lot of
| these kids have parents who move the whole family to be near to a
| high school that can get their children into the top schools.
| Most people in the US are not aware, or unable to do anything
| with this specific cultural knowledge you need to get in to those
| schools. Exceptions do not make the rule. So the top schools are
| filled with people who don't reflect the country which is bad I
| think.
|
| Second, as people have focused on STEM accomplishments just to
| get in to the top schools, I think Goodhart's Law is in action
| and that STEM competitions and precocious authorship is becoming
| less meaningful but whether admissions offices change I don't
| know if that will happen and has not yet. So these will continue
| to be performative for the time being which is also unfortunate.
| adelie wrote:
| 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 cases and
| evidence briefs for me. it wasn't worth the coaches' time to even
| listen to me practice because i wasn't wealthy enough to compete
| at a high level.
|
| that feeling of futility persisted across other extracurriculars.
| i participated in the science fair, but my advisor instantly
| became dismissive when it became clear that my parents couldn't
| gift me a competitive research opportunity at their lab or
| hospital because they, y'know, didn't work at a lab or hospital.
| the school i went to had a lot of rich kids; i once spotted one
| of my classmates at the airport on their way to volunteer in
| uganda over the summer.
|
| math team ended up my saving grace. perhaps it's because we
| weren't quite so competitive - we did well regionally but were
| not competitive at a state or national level - but there was
| something freeing in just solving math problems. afterschool math
| practice was free and open to everyone. there were a variety of
| different competitions, team and individual, geared for different
| skill levels and specializations. no one cared about what my
| parents did for a living, thank god. it was just about solving
| the damn math problem.
| dexwiz wrote:
| 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 widely from
| competition to competition. One time we got to be on local TV to
| compete, but there really wasn't a season or tournaments. It was
| mostly 1 on 1 matches after school. Overall it was a ton of fun.
|
| Academic Super Bowl was also full of smart kids, but they were
| more goal oriented. It was something you had to study for. Before
| the competition you were given some categories, you assigned
| categories to teammates, studied, and then competed at various
| events. It was literally just more memorization. I got drafted to
| do it one year the night before a competition, because I was The
| Guy for a topic they needed a teammate for. It was awful. I
| fumbled my way through because I didn't have near the detailed
| knowledge required for the specific subcategory. I probably would
| have done better if I had more time to prep. It was a big
| tournaments, and at the end there were different prizes for
| schools by various sizes.
|
| The type of kids in the two were varied. Everyone wanted to get
| into a good college. The former seemed to love knowledge for the
| sake of knowledge. While the later had a ton more grit, they
| lacked passion in areas outside of directed study. The former
| would read a book, because it was mentioned offhand in another
| piece of media. The later would read a book because it was
| assigned to them.
|
| Reading through this thread, it seems like people's experiences
| of Math Competitions varies from one to the other. Having grit to
| study and work at it gets you far, but having passion probably
| gets you further. The issue is grit tends to be fungible while
| passion is not.
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