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International Math Olympiad 2014 results are in! (India fails again)

Why do you think India's performance is so mediocre at the IMO?

IMO it is a culture thing. Indians don't care enough about international prestige so they don't invest money into this sort of things.

Americans, Chinese, and Soviets (not modern Russia sadly) are different. They want to have tallest building, fastest railroads, fastest supercomputers, largest universities, most Olympic gold medals, ect, so they invest a lot of money into these projects.

Source: look at India's Olympic performance, and Common Wealth opening.
 
No, we are a Special Administrative Region of the PRC. :china:

Hong Kong has never been an independent country in all of human history. We have always been a Chinese city, though once stolen by Western colonialists.
That's what i thought too until someone here said HK is a country :cuckoo:
 
Who represented Pakistan?? :undecided:
Was there any national competition held for this? Any merit based sorting? Very poor performance by Pakistan. :( It saddens me. We have better kids out there. We're better than that.
Anyway Congrats to China! :china:
 
Here are the results from 1959 to 2014:

International Mathematical Olympiad

Comparing to 2013 results:
China maintained at the top spot.
USA moved up one place from 3rd place to 2nd place.
Taiwan is doing well, moving from 8th place to 3rd.
Russia has 4th place for the fourth year in a row.
Japan also did well, moving from 11th place to 5th.
Ukraine is doing pretty well this year. Moving from 16 to 6 place.
South Korea dropped from 2nd place to 7th place.
Singapore dropped from 6th place to 8th place.
Canada moved up from 11th place to 9th place.
Vietnam dropped from 7th place to 10th place.

Out of last year's top 10 countries:
North Korea dropped from 5th to 14th
UK dropped from 9th to 20th
Iran dropped from 10th to 21st.

Out of the South Asia countries:
India dropped from 29th to 39th
Sri Lanka moved up from 56th to 54th
Bangladesh moved up from 61th to 53
Pakistan moved up from 79th to 75th

I would like to know the last names of the people who participated from the US.

I am surprise that India did so poorly since the zero was invented in India.

It's also a huge waste. So many Chinese students prepare for this, take classes for it, only to likely miss even getting a spot on the olympiad team. There are much better ways to end up at top universities.
Lose with class and be gracious, why be such a sore loser? If it's possible to study for these tests, Indians will study and prepare too like every other countries.
 
I would like to know the last names of the people who participated from the US.

I am surprise that India did so poorly since the zero was invented in India.

Team America:

James Tao
Mark Sellke
Allen Liu
Yang Liu
Sammy Luo
Joshua Brakensiek
 
Team America:

James Tao
Mark Sellke
Allen Liu
Yang Liu
Sammy Luo
Joshua Brakensiek
Thank you. Now I know why they ranked so high :)

I'm not down playing America's achievement. Recently I heard a local radio show about science and math test in Canada and the radio host wondered how many of the top winners had "foreign surnames".
 
Thank you. Now I know why they ranked so high :)

I'm not down playing America's achievement. Recently I heard a local radio show about science and math test in Canada and the radio host wondered how many of the top winners had "foreign surnames".

Here is Team Canada:

Zhuo Qun (Alex) Song
Kevin Sun
Antonio Molina Lovett
Caleb Ji
Alexander Whatley
Michael Chow

And Team United Kingdom:

Warren Li
Harvey Yau
Joe Benton
Gabriel Gendler
Freddie Illingworth
Frank Zhenyu Han
 
Here is Team Canada:

Zhuo Qun (Alex) Song
Kevin Sun
Antonio Molina Lovett
Caleb Ji
Alexander Whatley
Michael Chow

And Team United Kingdom:

Warren Li
Harvey Yau
Joe Benton
Gabriel Gendler
Freddie Illingworth
Frank Zhenyu Han

Also Australia's team

Alexander Gunning
Seyoon Ragavan
Mel Shu
Yang Song
Praveen Wijerathna
Damon Zhong.

Overseas Chinese represents only a small portion of America's, Canada's, UK's, and Australia's population, yet they take up over 50% of their math team.
 
Team America:

James Tao
Mark Sellke
Allen Liu
Yang Liu
Sammy Luo
Joshua Brakensiek

Here is Team Canada:

Zhuo Qun (Alex) Song
Kevin Sun
Antonio Molina Lovett
Caleb Ji
Alexander Whatley
Michael Chow

And Team United Kingdom:

Warren Li
Harvey Yau
Joe Benton
Gabriel Gendler
Freddie Illingworth
Frank Zhenyu Han

Also Australia's team

Alexander Gunning
Seyoon Ragavan
Mel Shu
Yang Song
Praveen Wijerathna
Damon Zhong.

Overseas Chinese represents only a small portion of America's, Canada's, UK's, and Australia's population, yet they take up over 50% of their math team.

I hope they remember their ancestral motherland and come back one day to work on our behalf. :enjoy:
 
I hope they remember their ancestral motherland and come back one day to work on our behalf. :enjoy:

They're drawn from the families of recent immigrants. From a NY Times article:

"The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.

“We’re living in a culture that is telling girls you can’t do math — that’s telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math,” said the study’s lead author, Janet E. Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world’s most-demanding math competitions. “Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, ‘If I’m not an Asian or a nerd, I’d better not be on the math team.’ Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they’re not even trying.”

Dr. Mertz asserts that the new study is the first to examine data from the most difficult math competitions for young people, including the USA and International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, and the Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates. For winners of these competitions, the Michael Phelpses and Kobe Bryants of math, getting an 800 on the math SAT is routine. The study found that many students from the United States in these competitions are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where education in mathematics is prized and mathematical talent is thought to be widely distributed and able to be cultivated through hard work and persistence.

One two-time Olympiad gold medalist, 22-year-old Daniel M. Kane, now a graduate student at Harvard, is the son of Dr. Mertz and her husband, Jonathan M. Kane, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, and a co-author of the study. The other two co-authors are Joseph A. Gallian, a math professor at the University of Minnesota and president of the Mathematical Association of America, and Titu Andreescu, a professor of math education at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former leader of the United States Olympiad team.

All members of the United States team were boys until 1998, when 16-year-old Melanie Wood, a cheerleader, student newspaper editor and math whiz from a private school in Indianapolis, made the team. She won a silver medal, missing the gold by a single point.

Since then, two female high school students, Alison Miller, from upstate New York, and Sherry Gong, whose parents emigrated to the United States from China, have made the United States team (they both won gold).

By comparison, relatively small Bulgaria has sent 21 girls to the competition since 1959 (six since 1988), according to the study, and since 1974 the highly ranked Bulgarian, East German/German and Soviet Union/Russian IMO teams have included 9, 10 and 13 girls respectively. “What most of these countries have in common,” the study says, “are rigorous national mathematics curricula along with cultures and educational systems that value, encourage and support students who excel in mathematics.”


Ms. Wood is now 27 and completing her doctorate in math at Princeton University. “There’s just a stigma in this country about math being really hard and feared, and people who do it being strange,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s particularly hard for girls, especially at the ages when people start doing competitions. If you look at schools, there is often a social group of nerdy boys. There’s that image of what it is to be a nerdy boy in mathematics. It’s still in some way socially unacceptable for boys, but at least it’s a position and it’s clearly defined.”

Ms. Miller, who is 22 and recently graduated from Harvard, and Ms. Gong, 19 and a Harvard sophomore, both cite Ms. Wood as their role model. Ms. Wood and Ms. Miller helped coach the United States girls’ team that began competing in the Girls’ Math Olympiad in China two years ago. Thirteen girls from the United States have competed in the last two years, according to the study, and all are of Asian descent except one, Jennifer Iglesias.

The leader of those two teams, and of the United States Olympiad team is Zuming Feng, who grew up in China and teaches math at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Dr. Feng says that in China math is regarded as an essential skill that everyone should try to develop at some level. Parents in China, he said, view math as parents in the United States do baseball, hockey and soccer.

“Here everybody plays baseball,” Dr. Feng said. “Everybody throws a few balls, regardless of whether you’re good at it, or not. If you don’t play well, it’s O.K. Everybody gives you a few claps. But people don’t treat math that way.”
 

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