<ol>
<li>It is not hard to find out that it has not been a high probability event for USA IMO members, let alone USAMO qualifiers, to become mathematicians/scientists with significant impact (I do not count being on the faculty of a good school alone as the indicator, but rather look at the impact of their works). Hence, it probably would not harm science/technology if and when MIT/Caltech/HYPS/… miss a few of these “potential” talents.</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>MIT is by no means the best American institution for scientist training. In terms of Nobel prizes awarded to their graduates, Harvard (60) and Columbia (40) both have more than MIT (30). In my STEM field, I certainly would not put MIT ahead of HYPS.</li>
</ol>
<p>I do not have time to look up the data on the national medal of technology, which might be more favorable to MIT.</p>
<ol>
<li>Since we are focusing on MIT, I understand the over-emphasis on USAMO/STEM. However, if one advocates for auto-admit of USAMO qualifier to MIT, would he/she also advocate for auto-admit of Scholastic writing gold medalists and Carnegie Hall performers to HYPS? Where do we stop? </li>
</ol>
<p>The admission process, one way or the other, should be used to (re)-assess the applications with all the materials from all applicants available. On a side note, I do believe that all colleges should have faculty involved, similar to what Caltech and Harvard have been doing (quite differently though).</p>
<ol>
<li>For researchers, particularly for scientists, failure is the norm while true success is rare exception. If a HS high achiever cannot even deal with a rejection from one university, I have doubt that he/she has the toughness to become a true scientist.</li>
</ol>
<p>PCHope, if being on the faculty of a good school doesn’t meet your condition for “impact,” what do you require? How many mathematicians are there in total with the level of impact you are looking for?</p>
<p>Thing is, though - you’re being very self-referential and “tight” with your definition of what’s a good school. It seems like you’re defining impact as a) attending MIT and / or b) winding up on the faculty at MIT, end stop. Does being on the faculty of Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, JHU, UIUC, UMichigan, etc. - not to mention other elite u’s which are not slouches in STEM – not count for having an impact on anything? </p>
<p>I mean, are you the kind of person for whom nothing counts unless it’s a gold medal? Making the Olympic team isn’t fantastic, stupendous, wow - it’s dispiriting unless you win the gold?</p>
<p>Do the mathematicians at Google or Akamai count for naught? Do you only get math brownie points if you end up as a professor?</p>
<p>Kind of like a neighbor of mine who defines patriotism as enlisting in the marines. Nothing else “counts”. (duh, he’s a former marine). You try to have a nuanced discussion about a diplomat who volunteers to stay in Libya despite the obvious danger, or even Hilary Clinton, or the thousands of men and women in the CIA, or a federal judge who gets death threats after putting away drug lords-- these are table stakes. The real game is in the marines.</p>
<p>I personally think the IT guy who finally figured out after 20 years that when I stick my ATM card into the machine I will ALWAYS want my transaction in English and not Spanish is a true hero to technology. But that’s me.</p>
<p>From an programming standpoint, that would easy enough to implement. From a system-wide standpoint maybe not so much: Normally, the central database is not called until you enter your PIN. If you wanted your preferred language to always display, that could require a separate call prior to entering your PIN, essentially doubling the use of bandwidth and slowing down the transaction – annoying if you’re waiting in line or are using an ATM during peak hours. Adding this info to your magnetic strip (an alternate solution) would probably take years to implement across thousands of banks worldwide and require software upgrades to each ATM.</p>
<p>In the end it’s really a management decision: why expend resources to improve the customer experience when said customer is not demanding it? It’s not unlike management deciding how many cash registers to keep open: how long will people wait in line before walking off without buying and perhaps never returning? As long as buyers are docile and patient, it’s in the company’s interest to hire less cashiers (or give them shorter hours).</p>
<p>I was told but not convinced that physicists are the smartest. Now I am impressed with how QuantMech came up with the number 18 from some small data sets. I am also impressed with Ron Unz’s arguments with much more data. Both are physicists probably. My seeking of complete raw data seems a sign of lack of intelligence. I thought we were to find out if the 18 were left out at random, but I am impressed with the shifting to how the 18 need to get over it. Lots of smart posters on this thread.</p>
<p>My definition of impactful mathematicians/scientists is directly related to your advocacy for USAMO qualifiers’ auto-admit to MIT, which we probably all agree is a big deal and should not be taken lightly. Hence, I would consider only those whose research works remain relevant at least 10 years after they retire. </p>
<p>As a tenured full professor with 20+ former PhD/postdoc trainees in academic positions and as a department chair in a very good university overseeing 55 TT faculty, I am not confident that I belong to that league when my time comes.</p>
<p>The Heisenberg principle applied to admissions–that you can’t shed light on what admissions is looking for because everyone will change their behavior-- is valid, but it only skews admissions if you are measuring something that doesn’t require talent.</p>
<p>It’s pretty clear that if you have good grades and get an olympic medal in track that you are an auto-admit to the ivies. However, people don’t do it because they can’t. A few people disagree on the value of USAMO, but I’d say the vast majority of median valedictorians could not do it even if they tried. There are some things that only a few people can do. If you revealed that proving Fermat’s last theorem would ensure entry to the school of your choice, it would not change admissions because no one (save Fermat and Andrew Wiles) could do it.</p>
<p>All you’d have to do for the ATM card is code it onto the card, same as expiration date. Or any coding that confirms your card/bank network is one that ATM accepts. </p>
<p>*If being on the faculty of a good school doesn’t meet your condition for “impact,” what do you require? * The obvious solution: auto-hire all MIT grads to teach at whatever school it is. After all, they are MIT grads.</p>
<p>So, what turned out for QMP’s friend who could fork in 1st grade?</p>
<p>C.alum: I am here to share the anecdote of the Olympic qualifier who was of zero interest to my employer- he had nothing going for him beyond some good stats and his sports accomplishments. Maybe he got into some other school- H or his flagship or a sports powerhouse. I don’t know.</p>
<p>Lol, mokusatsu, #2026. However, I think it’s really PCHope who is not impressed. </p>
<p>In #2021, PCHope remarked that “it has not been a high probability event for USA IMO members, let alone USAMO qualifiers, to become mathematicians/scientists with significant impact (I do not count being on the faculty of a good school alone as the indicator, but rather look at the impact of their works).”</p>
<p>So I was wondering what exactly counted as impact, in PCHope’s view, since being on the faculty of a “good” school was not enough.</p>
<p>Actually, I suspect that some of the mathematicians are having an impact at NSA and elsewhere, but we hear nothing of their work.</p>
<p>Secondly, I wanted to address the question about “gold medal or nothing.” I don’t think that a person has to be the best at what he/she does to have any impact. In fact, quite the contrary. In my view, the borders of knowledge are so broad that there are many places where the researchers are essentially one thick, right at the border (especially if it’s based on research groups, rather than single individuals).</p>
<p>On the other hand, I do think that a person has to be in the game to have a chance at impact. Some types of work can be done while holding another “day job.” For example, I have heard that Wallace Stevens (the poet) was employed as an actuary. To take an example from mathematics, the eminent logician Emil Post graduated from CCNY in 1917 at the age of 20, did a Ph.D. at Columbia, and post-doc at Princeton. He then became a high school teacher in New York. He obtained a faculty position at CCNY in 1936. I suspect that he did research in mathematics while teaching in high school that was sufficient to land that position (in combination with his earlier record, although the earlier record doesn’t seem to have been sufficient).</p>
<p>On the other hand, in both of these cases, no equipment was required for the work, other than a typewriter.</p>
<p>In contrast, suppose that someone wants to be an experimental particle physicist. This person will have to obtain a position as a faculty member at a good research university or as a staff scientist at a national/international lab. There are some opportunities for faculty at small colleges to join a team, but essentially never to run the team. There is some movement at the faculty level from small colleges to research universities, but not much. So, the person really has to qualify for the position he/she wants by about the end of the second post-doctoral appointment. Suppose that n faculty positions are open in experimental particle physics nationally at that time. I estimate that n is less than 20. Allowing for hiring mistakes and other influences, I would guess that if the person is not among the top 2n young experimental particle physicists on the job market at the time, the person is not going to be able to continue in that field. So in that sense, it is critical for the person to be among the best.</p>
<p>Of course, the person might have really enjoyed doing experimental particle physics while it lasted (although I think it would be frustrating not to have the opportunity to really direct a research effort). And many of the skills that go into experimental particle physics are readily transferable to another field. Without switching fields, the person might be able to obtain a kind of “senior, continuing post-doc” position, but again the opportunities to direct research would be fairly limited.</p>
<p>Then, to take theoretical particle physics (not my field): This is a research topic that can be pursued at a wider variety of universities. However, the university has to offer online access to the journals that the researcher needs, including a few that the librarians at the institution may consider rather esoteric. The person will be better off, research wise, if there is money and time to go to conferences, to hear about the work of others before it is published. The person will need to have sufficient time to devote to thinking about the field (on top of teaching loads that are typically heavier than those at research-intensive universities). The person probably also needs access to computation resources off-campus; and the person needs to be able to pursue ideas going practically solo, while other people in the field have sizeable research groups to handle some aspects of the problems. It is quite hard to have an impact in this case, but I think it could be done. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, even in this case, the person has to be able to obtain a faculty position to begin with–or else work on theoretical particle physics at night, while doing something else during the day. The latter is not inconceivable, but would be very hard.</p>
<p>So in a sense, after the second post-doc, it’s pretty much an “up or out” situation. If the person is not near the top of the young scientists in the field, “out” is the more likely scenario. He/she need not be the best, but has to be good enough to be permitted to stay in the game.</p>
<p>This situation is by no means limited to scientists. Someone alluded to Egyptologists, above. A faculty friend of mine has a daughter in one of the sub-fields of psychology. When she came on the Assistant Professor job market, there were 3 positions in her field available at research universities across the US and Canada. She got one of them! I think it’s safe to say that only the top dozen or so of the faculty candidates in the field at that time had a realistic chance at a position.</p>
<p>A study found that for economics and finance faculty, the productivity advantage of being at a top university declined in the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps due to cheaper communication. The same thing may have happened in physics.</p>
<p>I want to make it clear that MIT and others should value USAMO qualifying and other similar achievements in their admission process. However, I am skeptical of “awarding” auto-admit to these applicants because, in my observation, such achievements are not good predictors for future successful math/science impact. Even if we just look at the math/science faculty at good universities, only a very small portion of them are former IMO/IPOD/IBO/ICO medalists (it is much harder to find out who are USAxO qualifiers since few people would list them in their CVs). </p>
<p>In terms of probability, I agree that the likelihood of becoming impactful mathematicians/scientists would be p(IxO)>p(USAxO)>p(SAT-M 800)>p(SAT-M 600), but all are still low provability events and do not deserve auto-admit to the nation’s top colleges.</p>
<p>Well, Melanie Wood (first woman on a US International Mathematical Olympiad team, first American woman to be a Putnam fellow, first woman winner of the Morgan Prize for undergraduate research) has written that the people at Princeton advised her that being good at contest math did not mean that a person would be good at research. Nonetheless, she completed a Ph.D. at Princeton with Manjul Bhargava as her research adviser (he is about as close as a mathematician can get to being a rock star), and then held a Szego Assistant Professorship at Stanford before moving to her current Assistant Professorship at the University of Wisconsin.
[Melanie</a> Wood](<a href=“http://www.math.wisc.edu/~mmwood/]Melanie”>http://www.math.wisc.edu/~mmwood/)
She went to Duke as an undergrad. I am pretty sure that if she applied to MIT as an undergrad, they accepted her. This is a fine outcome. If she applied to MIT and was not accepted (which seems wildly improbable to me), the whole admissions office should have been cashiered at that point.</p>
<p>PCHope, I still don’t think you’ve said what constitutes impact.</p>
<p>Are there 2000 people out of the people graduating in a given year have a lasting impact on an academic field? If not, then USAMO winners do not necessarily have to have a lasting impact on their field to justify auto-admission.</p>
<p>Adding a field in a database table (or magnetic strip) is not much use if you don’t update your software code to look for it and respond to it. How many banks do you suppose there are, many using their own legacy code in a wide assortment of different programming languages? It must be a nightmare to get near-universal consensus for any change, otherwise they would have upgraded PINs from a fairly easy-to-crack 4-digit numeric to something far more secure many years ago.</p>
<p>Plus how would you know the preferred language when you issue the card? You have to ask on the application, which could invite government questions about ethnic profiling. And what if there are multiple copies of the card (husband and wife) with different preferences?</p>
<p>[Do</a> High School Science Competitions Predict Success? | The Scientist Magazine](<a href=“Do High School Science Competitions Predict Success? | The Scientist Magazine®”>Do High School Science Competitions Predict Success? | The Scientist Magazine®)
“Of the 2,080 finalists in the [Westingouse, now Intel] Science Talent Search since its inception in 1942, five have won Nobel Prizes; two have won Fields Medals for distinguished work in mathematics; eight have been awarded MacArthur Foundation Fellowships, the so-called genius awards; 28 have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences; and three are members of the National Academy of Engineering.”</p>
<p>discussing a study that was published in chapter 3 of “Beyond Terman: Contemporary Longitudinal Studies of Giftedness and Talent” by Rena F. Subotnik and Karen D. Arnold
(available in the Amazon preview of the book).</p>
<p>I’d guess that the predictive power of science contest achievement remains after adjusting for the higher grades and test scores of contest winners. Another question is whether going to a selective school boosts contest winners more than it does other students (I’d think so).</p>
