USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years

Re:USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21... by nopinsight on Saturday July 18, 2015 @11:27AM (#9907755)

Singapore at the 10th with fewer than 6 million people is also quite noteworthy. I wonder how much it has to do with importing talents or talented families from abroad, and how much from training starting at a young age.

(I know that Thailand does have a series of math competition for kids starting at grade 3. This was started less than 20 years ago, which helps explain its much improved IMO performance over the last decade.)

Any Singaporeans care to explain?

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Re:USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21... by archlight on Saturday July 18, 2015 @11:47AM (#9907809)

Singapore set up NUS high school a couple of years ago to nurture development of students talented in maths and science. I remember a ex IMO coach from was hired from China to prepare for the competition. it is not surprising it stands at tenth place if you have long term plan for it. btw 6 mio people are total population out of which only 3mio are singaporean. but if you are really talented and wealthy, you can quickly become singaporean

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Re:USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21... by netvarun on Saturday July 18, 2015 @01:48PM (#9908250)

Thanks for posting this. I've always wondered how come we "suddenly" started performing really well in the IMOs.

Considering the fact that until 2011, we had only won ONE gold medal and rarely featured in the top 30.

But from 2011 onwards, have won 10 gold medals and have started to consistently appear in the top 10.

Background: Singaporean who once aspired into getting into the IMO team [this was circa <=2004]. But ended up with a crappy silver medal in the informatics olympiad. Now a washed up, recovering Perl hacker.

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Re:USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21... by nopinsight on Saturday July 18, 2015 @02:15PM (#9908355)

Thanks for your reply. From my experience teaching math to gifted students, it takes a lot longer than a couple of years to develop talents at this level though. Starting young (by elementary school) seems to be a requirement.

Perhaps there might have been special tracks and/or competitions to help nurture these kids and their peers for quite a while before the NUS high school was set up?

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