Where do all the smart, curious, earnest kids go these days?
One of my friends asked me this recently, and I wasn’t sure what to say.
In the last ten years, something has changed.
If I had to summarize my concerns in one sentence, I would say this:
kids these days no longer feel they’re allowed to work on what they’re
interested in or excited about.
Instead, they feel obligated to work on whatever happens to be considered
the most “important” (or “prestigious”) thing possible.It’s for this reason I consider ambition as a double-edged sword.
When ambition isn’t accompanied by excitement, earnestness, curiosity,
or interest, it doesn’t usually end well.
But let me do a bit of story-telling.
Hobbies
When I was kid, math contests were seen as a hobby, or sport, or game.
Those were the good old days.
Sometime this week the American Math Competitions released the following new policy:
For the IMO, EGMO, RMM, TSTSTs, and TSTs, and MOP, students must be US citizens or US permanent residents.
Visas are not a valid substitute.
(AMC Policies)
I want to make a rather brief statement on why I was opposed to this change.
To do this I want to draw an analogy.
In the American Math Competitions, students are asked what gender they identify with,
which is used to determine whether they are eligible for the
European Girl’s Math Olympiad and also for invitations to MOP.
This means that in theory, you could try to abuse the system by
deliberately misrepresenting your self-identified gender.
But in practice, nobody has attempted this.
So, we continue to allow students to self-identify their gender,
in order to make sure to be inclusive to students with gender dysphoria,
and trusting our …
I’m now going to say something explicitly that I
hinted at in June:
I don’t think a student deserves to make MOP more because they had a higher score than another student.
I think it’s easy to get this impression because the selection for MOP is done
by score cutoffs. So it sure looks that way.
But I don’t think MOP admissions (or contests in general) are meant to be a form
of judgment. My primary agenda is to run a summer program that is good for its
participants, and we get funding for N of them. For that, it’s not important
which N students make it, as long as they are enthusiastic and adequately
prepared. (Admittedly, for a camp like MOP, “adequately prepared” is a tall
order). If anything, what I would hope to select for is the people who would get
the most …
While making preparations for this year’s MOP,
I imagined to myself what I would say on orientation night if I was director of the camp,
and came up with the following speech.
I thought it might be nice to share on this blog.
Of course, it represents my own views, not the actual views of MOP or MAA.
And since I am not actually director of MOP, the speech was never given.
People sometimes ask me, why do we have international students at MOP?
Doesn’t that mean we’re training teams from other countries?
So I want to make this clear now: the purpose of MOP is not to train and select future IMO teams.
I know it might seem that way, because we invite by score and grade.
But I really think the purpose of MOP is to give each one of you
the experience of working …
This is a rare politics post; I’ll try to keep this short and emotion-free.
If parts of this are wrong, please correct me.
More verbose explanations here,
here,
here,
here,
longer discussion here.
Suppose you are a math PhD student at MIT.
Officially, this “costs” $50K a year in
tuition.
Fortunately this number is meaningless, because math PhD students
serve time as teaching assistants
in exchange for having the nominal sticker price waived.
MIT then provides a stipend of about $25K a year for these PhD student’s living expenses.
This stipend is taxable, but it’s small and you’d pay only $1K-$2K in federal taxes (about 6%).
The new GOP tax proposal strikes
26 U.S. Code 117(d)
which would cause the $50K tuition waiver to also become taxable income:
the PhD student would pay taxes on an “income” of $75K, at tax brackets of …
Hmm, so hopefully this will be finished within the next 10 years.
— An email of mine at the beginning of this project
My Euclidean geometry book was published last March or so.
I thought I’d take the time to write about what the whole process of publishing this book was like,
but I’ll start with the disclaimer that my process was probably not very typical
and is unlikely to be representative of what everyone else does.
Writing the Book
The Idea
I’m trying to pinpoint exactly when this project changed from “daydream” to “let’s do it”,
but I’m not quite sure; here’s the best I can recount.
It was sometimes in the fall of 2013, towards the start of the school year; I think late September.
I was a senior in high school, and I was only enrolled in two classes.
It was fantastic …
There’s a Mantra that you often hear in math contest discussions:
“math olympiads are very different from math research”.
(For known instances, see O’Neil,
Tao,
and more.
More neutral stances: Monks,
Xu.)
It’s true. And I wish people would stop saying it.
Every time I’ve heard the Mantra, it set off a little red siren in my head: something felt wrong.
And I could never figure out quite why until last July.
There was some (silly) forum discussion about how
Allen Liu had done
extraordinarily on math contests over the past year. Then someone says:
A: Darn, what math problem can he not do?!
B: I’ll go out on a limb and say that the answer to this is “most of the
problems worth asking.” We’ll see where this stands in two years,
at which point the answer will almost certainly change, but research …
