I'd note that historically the Soviet Union (and later Russia), Hungary and Romania have all done extremely well.

Knowing more than a few people who grew up in that area prior to the 1990's I think it is interesting how engineering was seen as such as a prestigious career.

Many children were encouraged to study math because it was seen as a pathway to that kind of career. I think there is some similarities with at least China and Singapore - I've had a number of Chinese interns who were encouraged to do math competitions as a pathway to Computer Science.

While I do not think that you have to win competitions like this, you should probably aim for a placement at least roughly corresponding to your GDP and importance in world politics. I mean Germany is deciding the faith of Europe during difficult times, but places behind small and/or poor countries like North Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam and so on?

I think this should be something that bothers us, we do not accept and take on as an issue. When Germany performed really badly in football at the Euro 2000 and 04 (and lucked through the WC 02), it changed the team, reformed the whole system and has since had an all-German Champions League final, a World Cup win and consecutively reached every semifinal in every WC and Euro. Similarly, England pumped a ton of money into sports to score at its Olympics in London and it sure did.

(Western) Europe likes to discount these achievements by pointing at tiger moms and authoritarian education for Asia and elitist, overly performance centric instead of humanist education for America. While there is probably some truth to that and I do not think we have to change our whole system, I do not buy that Asians are simply geniuses. We should value achievements like this a bit higher and we can and should probably do a bit better even with European genes.

I know a few IMO participants from Germany, a lot of those that perform extremely well also end up as awesome research mathematicians (Faltings, Scholtze) I am not sure the same can be said of the other countries.

There have been 14 non-German Fields medal winners who were former IMO medallists, so they seem to have done ok[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...

What you are hinting reminds me of my e-sport days. At some point, when the game I liked was dying, European professionals moved on to other games. At first Koreans were still playing and would win all the remaining European competitions, later they moved on, too, and the remaining clubs all bought Chinese teams.

Some top imo scorers will end up as great math researchers but that's far from a trend.

There's also a lot of top mathematicians that failed miserably at the imo.

I think some fields in math are very close to this style of problems while others are so alien that good scores at the imo are a useless predictor of success for those fields.

If you look at the list of winners. Many of them come from authoritarian countries. I have no doubt that the Chinese government actively aids its competitors with great incentives and probably a few questionable practices.

As long as they're not cheating, what's the problem? Is providing great incentives to students who excel academically somehow a bad thing?

I'm just saying the Chinese care way more about their image than Americans. So it should come as no surprise when they are more aggressive towards winning these awards. The American government has better ways to spend taxpayer money.

Why is winning the math olympiad "about their image" and not about academic excellence or even just the spirit of competition? And how is buying tanks the military tells congress they don't need really a better use of money than helping children excel in math?

There's probably a large societal aspect to this too; the gender imbalance stands out much more than ethnicity, in my opinion.

Note too that each country can only send 6 people, and Asian countries (China, India, arguably Japan and South Korea) have a much larger pool to draw from, although this doesn't explain the prevalence of Asian-Americans on the USA team.

How have Japan and South Korea a larger pool to draw from?

It's worth keeping in mind that distributions of males tend to have longer tails than their equivalents for females.

If you haven't read Malcolm Gladwell on Rice Farming and math you really should give it a look: http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/

You could just as easily turn that around, though and say that Asians have better systems for numbers because they are inherently more gifted at numerical manipulation. But either way, winning the IMO has very little to do with calculation ability anyway.

Why assume that it's necessarily a one-way relationship? Real life is full of these positive feedback loops. A slight innate mathematical advantage leads to a slightly better system which leads to mathematics being slightly more valuable, prompting a higher valuation on mathematical ability in one's potential spouse.

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that my explanation was the correct one. I was simply pointing out that there are alternatives to Gladwell's that are equally consistent with the facts he presents.

If forced to choose, i'd probably pick the feedback loop theory as well though.

It also has very little to do with real-life mathematics ability.

What is real-life mathematics ability?

Seems like I should clarify... It may be that Asians are just better at math — “inherently” as you say. Ok, maybe.

It also seems possible that there are certain aspects of language and culture that support math achievement. Gladwell, in _Outliers_ is after this category of explanation.

Personally, I tend to like cultural explanations more than raw talent explanations because I like to think that everyone is capable of everything (eventually, if they work hard enough). I certainly like to act like everyone is capable of everything and it helps to have supporting theories.

Gladwell’s theory goes something like this: First, the counting systems tend to be more consistent, less idiosyncratic. This means kids learn them better earlier and build confidence early. This early start builds on itself — a point he comes back to over and over in his book. Second, the numbers tend to be faster to say. This means you can remember more digits — quite a few more. This has the same impact on confidence. Third — and this is his main deal — rice farming yields to careful, persistent effort much like a math problem. This is less true of western farming. All the western farming sayings go something like “there’s no accounting for the weather. sometimes your just eff’d!”. All the Asian sayings go something like “work hard and your family will prosper for generations.” He says this gives Asians a leg up in math because math yields to the same kind of persistent effort.

Also — someone below diss’d on Gladwell calling him a “pop” psychologist. I don't think he is not a psychologist, though I guess he is pretty pop. Still, what he does, while researched, is not science, that’s for sure.

I think explanations like Gladwell's are valuable even if they are not true because they at least show us how nuanced and twisty the truth might be. That keeps us looking for explanations that are maybe not so simple. That's good because as a species we're stupid enough without the crippling detriment of thinking we already understand what we do not.

EDIT: very minor for clarity.

Ya, I don't mean to say that he's wrong. Simply that he is cherry picking a narrative around his facts and presenting it as though the facts prove the narrative without really mentioning that there are other narratives that are also consistent with those facts.

What you "like to think" is irrelevant because reality isn't here for our benefit.

This is not a very nice way to formulate your objection, but I have to agree. Believing things because you'd like them to be true is a terrible way of trying to get at the truth, and the arguments for that position are the most contorted I've seen in a while.

If a language's number system had this kind of relevance it would be expected that french and German people would have a lower representation in the math community.

That is definitely not the case.

EDIT: instead of french and german people, I should have said people whose native language is French or German.

Malcom Gladwell has been debunked thoroughly.

I think it speaks to people with 10k hours in X activity. It's a nice ego boost. Who cares if it's entirely speculative?

Pop psych on HN, really?