Three American High Schoolers Swept An International Competition By Crushing These Math Problems

Business Insider ^ | 08/14/2013 | Walter Hickey

[SeekAndFind]

Three Phillips Exeter Academy students — Alex Song, Ray Y. Li, and Kevin C. Sun — shocked the world when they respectively won the gold, silver and bronze medals in the 54th International Mathematical Olympiad in Santa Marta, Colombia.

While the U.S. team placed third overall — Song competed on Team Canada — the trio won the medals for individual performance.

The annual competition is a six question, two day, nine hour proof competition with competitors from over 100 countries on 9 continents.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: You can tell the sixth guy from left to right plays serious Chess, too ...

Wow, how can you tell?

[muir_redwoods]

A propensity for scientific inquiry and excellence may be evenly distributed but mathematics, the queen of the sciences, is one that largely requires little equipment or expensive material. Cultures that don’t possess the wherewithal to fund chemistry labs, cyclotrons and observatories of necessity push scientifically gifted kids towards math. It’s cheap.

[SMARTY]

None of it will matter at all if the kid DOES NOT/WILL NOT apply himself. That’s certain.

If the kid wants to bust his chops and succeed, that’s one thing... if he doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter WHERE he goes to school, what kind of instruction he gets, who the teacher is, or how much it cost.

I meant that Sharpton and friends won’t scream to get inner city minority kids in a place like that because (apart from qualifying) they’d have to work their a^%es off sun up to sun down... and like doing it too. What... WORK???? Really!

[MHGinTN]

The end of his nose is red, his shirt is not tucked in neatly —bulging over to conceal his belt, and his coat is unbuttoned with his right hand not ‘down in front’. Next you’ll want to know why these signs of a serious Chess player are solid identifiers.

[Steve_Seattle]

My girlfriend is Filipina, and grew up in a village with no electricity and no running water. She was basically raised by her grandparents, who got her a good education at a Catholic girls' school. She speaks and writes better English than most Americans, and spent much of her adult life teaching literature and writing at the college level.

But by her own admission, Filipinos like to live well, and will work hard enough to get a good job, but they are not "driven" and therefore rarely rise to the very top in intellectual or athletic pursuits. Culture matters.

[Lmo56]

Hey - I won the Einstein medal back in high school. ‘Course, I grew up to help write the Obamacare law too ...

Proof: 2 = 1

Let: a = b
Then: a2 = ab
Then: a2 + a2 = a2 + ab
Then: 2a2 = a2 + ab
Then: 2a2 – 2ab = a2 + ab – 2ab
Then: 2a2 – 2ab = a2 – ab
Then: 2(a2 – ab) = 1(a2 – ab)
Then: 2(a2 – ab) / (a2-ab) = 1(a2 – ab) / (a2-ab)

Therefore: 2 = 1

Thank you very much - I am now off to Stockholm to claim my Nobel Prize ...

[DuncanWaring]

I don’t think that problem has a single solution; by my calculations, the answer could be any value between 10/3 and 10.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: 2(a2 – ab) / (a2-ab) = 1(a2 – ab) / (a2-ab)

Hey , I didn’t know that a division by ZERO is now defined...

[calex59]

How did Sum Ting Wong do?

I don't know but Wi Tu Lo was found lying on the floor of his hotel room and he missed the competition.

[EDINVA]

There ARE inner-city kids who are willing to and do work their buns off, and they have a further battle with Sharpton-type influenced peers who accuse them of ‘acting white,’ and we all know how effective peer pressure can be. So to those kids who have worked hard and who get these scholarships, a double mazel tov.

[SeekAndFind]

Here is something very interesting I notice in the above names of contestants. I have lived and worked in the 6 countries around the world -— USA, Australia, Philippines, Taiwan, the Netherlands and Japan.

I KNOW Chinese names when I see one ( Heck, I speak the language ).

I notice that even in countries like Malaysia, the Philippines, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Sweden, Argentina not to mention the USA, the contestants are ETHNIC CHINESE.

Just look at the last names of the contestants for the Philippines and Malaysia as an example -— Adrian Reginald Sy, Deany Hendrick Cheng, Mikaela Angelina Uy, Farrell Eldrian Wu, Ma. Czarina Angela Lao, How Si Yu, Anzo Teh Zhao Yang, Khong Yi Kye, etc.

ALL OF THEM have CHINESE last names.

[Albion Wilde]

Wow! Quite a list of names! Cannot tell who's who among the many non-European languages; but from the Western countries, I saw around 30 female names.

Not a DeOndray or Shaniqua in the bunch, though.

[PieterCasparzen]

Philips is part of the elite educational system.

There are two educational systems in the world: elite, and “everybody else”.

New World Order sought and attained control of both, wresting them away from the Church, in efforts that go back centuries.

Most people don’t get the idea: it’s not that NWO directs each and every action of every student at every school. It’s simply about having ultimate control over curriculum, and being able to choose which children get put into the elite system, i.e., keep those who would cause problems for NWO out of the the elite schools, and away from learning things like higher math.

NWO has a great need for highly-educated but dutiful “elite” minions to work on their science and engineering problems. Now, many other folks can also get into science and engineering and work their fool heads off and make good money. But never having been clued in to NWO, they will reliably dismiss it as an untrue conspiracy theory.

The set up and control of “public schools” in America was begun in earnest by George Peabody and continued under Rockefeller. “Dissenting” types, children who exhibit strong affinity for true believing Christianity, anti-unionism, that oppose “the herd”, are simply “tended” by public school teachers until they graduate. The job of their teachers is to simply do nothing: don’t counsel them on higher math or college education. Simply allow those children to undermine their own education by wasting their early years.

NWO’s “job” for publics schools is not to educate “the masses”, but to hold their education back.

Most children in elite schools have no idea about NWO and are not on the “inside track”. Many go on to do nothing all that great.

The NWO financial oligarchy elites, however, do send capable children of their choosing to these elite schools - and they know that the child’s education will not - in their eyes - be “polluted” by any true Christian teaching. It will be a fantastic education for the child to grow up and accomplish difficult tasks for NWO, and part and parcel with that is having a moral foundation dictated by NWO instead of the Bible.

[Albion Wilde]

I’d hope the scholarship program were racially/ethnically/geographically neutral tho, so a qualified kid from a WV hollow would also be funded.

Yeah, lots of luck with that! :-)

[Grampa Dave]

Should you be called a racist for your real world observations re the race of the winners? Not at all!

In early June we attended an honors award for a fairly new middle school with an good reputation for good results. Many of the students have parents in scientific jobs from Livermore to universities and tech companies.

Our young relative is an Anglo white teenage gal with straight A's and zero absences in middle school. She was one of 20 something Math award members. There were 5 other girls. There were 2 other Anglo girls, a white Russian girl, who started school 3 years ago in America, and two Asian girls.

The boys getting awards with the exception of one Anglo were Asian and Indian, not Native American Indians.

The top two math students were the Russian Girl and an Asian boy.

There were zero Hipanics and Blacks getting a math award. A couple of each won an entertainment award, and they had a big fan club with the other winners.

Later I discussed the mixes with the girls Dad and Mother. Both of them were honor students across the board and excellent athletes.

They said most of the white kids, Hispanic kids and the black kids would be classified as wanna be Gang Bangers or worse. That was clearly confirmed at the graduation ceremony a few weeks later for all of the kids. Many of their parents looked and acted like over grown thugs with tats everywhere, baseball hats with flat brims on the sides of their heads and pants looking plumber's pants. Most of them where incapable of having a conversation with the old normal parents/relatives.

Hopefully, the math winners as noted by this thread and the ones I described, will become great Americans and help keep us afloat for their generations and ones to come.

Of course like most California mid and High Schools this school had no programs for those who would be good college students. As our male relative noted, a job in a fast food restaurant might be too much for most of the kids in what is considered one of California's better middle schools.

[EinNYC]

Yeah. With a very highly selective admission, they don't have classrooms filled with students who answer questions with, "Suck my d*ck" instead of "chromosome" or "7.5%". And I'll be willing to bet that 60% of what comes out of their teachers' mouths doesn't have to be, "Put that cell phone away."

Know what the most commonly asked classroom question I've ever encountered is?

Wait for it...

"Can I have the bathroom pass?" And if the answer is "No", what is the most common response?

"Den I gonna piss on the floor!" or some variant thereof.

Disgusting, but true.

[Lmo56]

RE: 2(a2 – ab) / (a2-ab) = 1(a2 – ab) / (a2-ab)

Hey , I didn’t know that a division by ZERO is now defined...

You don't even need to go that far. Taking the first "Then" statement defines the sixth "Then" statement as 0 = 0.

However, you are wrong about division by "zero" as being undefined - "Zero" has been dividing America for 5 years ... :)

[Rodamala]

That was in response to the Calvin and Hobbes word problem, I take it. If so, you are correct... the problem does not state the points are colinear. 10/3”<=AC<=10”. -1 point for no units! :P

[spel_grammer_an_punct_polise]

“I don’t think it’s a matter of IQ, but application.”

That and the Asian mindset. They are raised from birth to work hard and excel at everything they do.

I watched a Vietnamese father give his 16-year-old daughter a spanking for getting a “B” on her report card while the rest of her grades were all “As”.

[SgtHooper]

Quantitative easing in the math world.