Skip to main content

Go Team USA

By



American students typically stumble in math and science, with the United States ranked a pitiful 36 in math proficiency worldwide, but don't tell that to the US Math Team, who took home the gold medal in this year's International Math Olympiad.  The event was held in Thailand.  In recent years, it has been dominated by China and other Asian countries.  The US team generally holds its own, but hadn't won the event since 1994.

Not surprisingly, there has been little coverage.  The International Math Olympiad is a seated competition and doesn't have the same drama as the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  The students are given six tough questions and graded by judges.  The best overall team performance takes home top honors, but gold medals are also awarded individually.

As you can see from the above photo, the American team is a diverse group, which also is indicative of the nature of American education, which ranges dramatically from one school district to the next.  There have been attempts to create a national standard, most recently Common Core, which has come under a barrage of fire this campaign season.  Forty-four states subscribe to Common Core, but support has dwindled considerably and one can expect some states to drop out, if not see the program done away with all together if the Republicans win the White House.

These particular kids go through a battery of tests leading up to a summer camp that determines the participants.  They are the top of the tops, and should be greatly commended for their efforts, but unfortunately most Americans don't seem to care.  You see local papers taking pride in members that came from its' school districts, but not much in the way of national coverage, outside of periodicals like The Atlantic.

It's too bad because this was a major accomplishment and one that US schools could use to build their math and science programs on.  Alas, it is sports that American covet most.  You won't see any of these kids on a Wheaties box, but they will all go onto prestigious universities, probably with full scholarships.

Anyway, I thought it was worth noting and now I will see if I can tackle one of the questions:

Determine all triples (a, b, c) of positive integers such that each of the numbers: ab - c, bc - a, ca - b is a power of two.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more