<p>-He- could be. We don’t know anything about him, except that he took an admittedly difficult class his senior year.</p>
<p>But in general, average<em>math</em>ability(set of people who took Math 25 senior year) <<< average<em>math</em>ability(set of people who made the US IMO team). If you disagree with this, you quite simply have no idea what you’re talking about.</p>
<p>All of this is to refute your original point: there -aren’t- lots of ways to demonstrate the kind of mathematical ability that making the US IMO team demonstrates. In fact, there’s really only one way that gets substantial use: actually making the US IMO team.</p>
<p>Yep, just doubled checked. RSI over IMO (for several people). Of course, both ec’s are stellar. I think the RSI may be harder to reach, though. You have to be off the chart in math PLUS have leadership skills/potential.</p>
<p>Some people think math competitors are textureless math grinds. In fact, they are multi-talented people and have wonderful personality. Here are some profiles.</p>
<p>Generally, smarter people are more interesting, but there is nothing in those profiles that is especially compelling or surprising beyond what we know: they are very smart, studious, great at exam competitions, willing to train, have many of the usual related interests. There’s nothing wrong with that, and there was never a need to establish that these people aren’t androids, but they also don’t fall all that far from the usual expectations, and most of them will have the career paths that correlate with winning a major math olympiad.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with that. But some people are willing to jump to conclusion. Look at some comments in the thread created by a fake USAMO winner.</p>
<p>I actually know some USAMO winners and one or two IMO winners. They are not in the least grinds, incapable of doing anything but math. In fact, those I know are multi-talented and quite social.
Regarding post 61: Adcoms have different means of identifying math talent than the general public who must depend on the publicity generated by competition success. Not every talented student chooses or is groomed to enter competitions.
And adcoms probably think so, too, even when the students do not participate in math competitions.</p>
<p>I’m just struck by the conviction among many on here that outsized achievement in math should guarantee admission to a top school. Surely at this point folks understand that there is an element of luck involved and that absolutely nothing, except perhaps being the offspring of the president, guarantees admission anywhere.</p>
<p>It may be worth re-emphasizing that it looks like the vast majority of IMO team members who apply to Harvard are accepted. Over the course of a few years, two exceptions have been noted. And at least one of them, maybe both, did not make the IMO team until after the admission process had concluded. </p>
<p>Only a few IMO team members have not finished high school, so IMO team membership itself is probably a factor in college admissions for only a couple people a year. And it looks like those people DO get accepted at Harvard if they apply. Harvard seems to accept a lot of people who have the math talent that might win them a place on the IMO teach. Just not every one of them.</p>
<p>Actually, for tippy top students (whether in academics, sports, arts), the element of chance is much less than for very high-achieving but not otherwise outstanding applicants.</p>
<p>Unless, however, an applicant has achieved a major, national or international award, the general public has no way of knowing whether the applicant is stellar or not. That, however, does not mean that adcoms do not know. They have a lot more information than the general public has to guide their selection.</p>
<p>I don’t think there is such a thing. Invitation to IMO occurs during the summer training session, long after RSI attendance decisions are made.</p>
<p>What does happen, in the US and elsewhere, is people reaching the IMO before finishing high school, and then doing something else the next summer. This is rare (rarer than reaching the IMO before the final year) except in cases where the olympiad result was a gold medal, or where the candidate is so strong that there are additional years of IMO eligibility and it’s almost a given that they can make the team again later.</p>
<p>Post #61 was entirely correct. Howard Gardner-like claims of multiple alternative tracks for demonstrating the kind of talent manifested in the IMO are silly. The parallel tracks are very few, very narrow, and rarely utilized. Being an all-around prodigy or an amazing problem solver (not interested in competitions but able to excel at them) or a master theoretician in one’s teenage years, is less common than winning olympiads. </p>
<p>You may be impressed by your son’s Math 25 Harvard friend, but the chances that this guy would be selected for the IMO are low even if he tried. Trust me that the indicators in what you posted are all negative for that outcome. He might get a PhD, or a degree with exquisite Latin annotations, or a fancy travelling fellowship, but those are all a different sort of accomplishment. Mastering a difficult but pedestrian math course at age 17-18 is not as impressive as doing the same one year later but with some of those competition victories under one’s belt, and neither is writing a nice shiny senior thesis, unless it involves successful research on a hard problem.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What actually happens is academic natural selection, where those who can’t perform so well on objective competitions find other outlets for their talents. Cases of phenomenal problem solvers who, due to lack of time or interest, decline the competitions, are rarer than cases of actually winning the competitions. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>American students “taking rigorous math in high school” number in the thousands. Students who can do well on the IMO number in the dozens. Nearly all of the capable math students can and do participate in competitions, so there aren’t a lot of hidden diamonds that suddenly reveal themselves at college application time. There’s a relatively linear talent hierarchy, not multiple Gardner-ish dimensions of mathematical intelligence, and that hierarchy is fairly well revealed by the competitions and a very limited number of other means.</p>
<p>I am not claiming that phenomenal problem solvers decline to participate in the Olympiads.
I am claiming that not every student is intensively groomed for competitions. The Bay-area Math Circle attracts students interested in competitions and prepares them for those competitions. But not every Math Circle has the same mission. Nor is every school interested in preparing its students to compete, even at the local level.
I can personally attest to differences among local schools regarding the level of support and degree of preparation for competition offered to capable students whether it is in math, sciences, or social studies.</p>
<p>siserune, some of what you say is sensible, and some of it is flat-out wrong. As far as I can tell, the statement “Nearly all of the capable math students can and do participate in competitions” is flat-out wrong. The statement “there’s a relatively linear talent hierarchy . . . and that hierarchy is fairly well revealed by the competitions” has the ring of being wrong, too, despite its qualifications.</p>
<p>I don’t know THAT many kids who went to Harvard to study math, just four or five. They were all good enough to be accepted everywhere they applied, essentially. They were all solidly math nerds, although often other-thing nerds as well. They were all taking college math courses long before high school ended. As far as I know, none of them participated in math competitions.</p>
<p>Of course, none of them would probably have won a place on the IMO team, because (as you point out) hardly anyone does, and the place represents being extraordinarily good at a particular skill set under particular (and artificial) circumstances. That’s fine, great even, but it doesn’t convince me that it is a perfect measure of mathematical talent.</p>
<p>Look, I know there are national mock trial and moot court competitions out there. Do Harvard and Yale Law Schools dominate them? No. Harvard and Yale Law Schools generally don’t give a crap about them. Are the students who win them very good and very talented? Sure. Are they the best law students in the country? Who knows?, but probably not even close.</p>
<p>Law is a very different animal, nearly the opposite of mathematics in this respect. There is an explicit hierarchy of law schools, but the function of law degrees and licensing exams is to prevent too much further ranking of individuals. Other than firm(s) of employment and degrees earned (the blurb listed on the corporate web site or Martindale-Hubbell) there isn’t much other evidence on which to base an ability ranking. </p>
<p>Moot court competitions are more important to students at lower-tier law schools precisely because they are stuck in the lower tiers, and don’t have the status insurance of a JD from a top 2-3 law school. In mathematics, individual performance is much more visible and comparable both before and after degrees are granted. The legal analogue would be Law Review editorship, Supreme Court clerkships, and Latin-decorated degrees that line the path to an academic position or judicial appointment, and HLS/YLS students contemplating that direction are far from not giving a damn about those frills.</p>
<p>Oh, so you mean that math competitions are POLITICAL! That, I understand! (Just kidding, but there ARE a bunch of politics involved in L. Rev. editorships, S.Ct. clerkships, academic positions, and judicial appointments, in addition to actual talent and ability.)</p>
<p>My law school year at Harvard (where I didn’t go) has produced three pretty well-known law professors at Harvard and Stanford, none of whom clerked for the Supreme Court, although eight of their classmates did. I can guarantee you that back then plenty of people thought that Kathleen Sullivan, Joe Singer, and Louis Kaplow were smarter and more talented than most or all of their Supreme Court-clerking colleagues, including said colleagues. Sullivan wasn’t even on the Law Review; she was Larry Tribe’s research assistant. Kaplow was offered a position on the faculty before he graduated. To the extent there’s a relatively linear hierarchy of talent for young legal academics, that would pretty much represent the pinnacle.</p>
<p>I hope I don’t offend but my sense in watching the math competition escapades at our high school is that (1) the kids who do them and excel have a lot of talent, and (2) the kids who do them and excel have an extremely obsessed parent - oddly, often the father - who is pretty manic about the whole scene.</p>
<p>The most distinguished mathematician to come out of our high school was a young lady who never entered a math competition but worked closely with profs at our local state U and then went to Duke on the AB scholarship and then went overseas on some fellowship and now is in a rarified place working equations that will save the world. There have been two young men from our school who made it pretty far in math olympiad - all I know is they went to Washington DC for the whole summer and did lots of math on someone’s tab. One went to Princeton as a math major, switched to philosophy and is now at Berkeley, still in a grad program last I heard. The other went to MIT, left before graduating and lives in silicon valley writing apps for various software and cell phone companies. I believe he earns a good living but his dad - who I run into at debate competitions (which he put his second child into) - is livid.</p>
<p>So forgive me if I view this whole thread as sort of preposterous.</p>
<p>Math can be a great hook - no question. So can playing the harp. Neither is a guarantee of a top school.</p>
<p>Very, very few of the people who make the IMO are “groomed for competitions” in the manner that you imply, simply because grooming doesn’t work. It is insulting to continue suggesting that others who didn’t make the cut (or didn’t try to) were strong contenders who only lacked coaching or support from their high school. Those factors hardly matter at all. </p>
<p>You can’t just take any given diligent, high-ability student and exogenously generate high scores through the magical process of “grooming”. On the analogous (and easier) college competition, the annual Putnam contest, the median score is <em>zero</em> although it’s taken by thousands of college math majors and there are preparation classes at a number of colleges. Qualification for IMO is the result of individual study, solitary and rarely under the supervision of a tutor or coach. </p>
<p>To repeat: competitions of IMO difficulty level are not like an advanced math class or a Westinghouse science project or a grad school dissertation where putting in the work and having good mentors is ultimately enough. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, the IMO is not like the national college entrance exams in France or Asia, where hiring a coach or attending a cram school will take a plausible contender and produce a winner. You can’t just take your son or that Math 25 kid and put them in touch with an olympiad coach and wait for the medals to roll in a couple of years later. It’s not like a class or a college degree or a PhD where success is basically a function of diligence given a threshold level of ability. It is profoundly selective of cognitive skills that are relatively rare even among high-powered math students, at least for the performance range represented by IMO gold/silver medalists from the top countries with a hard selection process. </p>
<p>It it true that there may be more of a competition culture in the Bay Area, but it is of minor value in mastering the contests, and the Berkeley math circle materials are available to anyone through the Internet, so the locals have no real advantage or special “grooming”. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The school rarely makes a difference. A school’s connections to colleges and research labs, its willingness to allow flexibility in scheduling or give credit for outside work – all this can make a difference in the science project competitions. For the IMO, the school is superfluous, or a minor hindrance, and in a few extremely exceptional cases (Exeter and a couple of others) can provide some help. Most contestants are pretty much on their own.</p>
<p>You seem to assume that every child with potential will develop this potential regardless of personality or environment, and do so by the end of high school and prove it by taking part in competitions. My contention is that it is not a correct assumption. </p>
<p>Adcoms seem to agree with me as they look for diamonds in the rough–namely students who show potential but not necessarily proof of achievement. Admission to college is not a reward for past achievements but a statement of belief that the applicant has what it takes to thrive in a particular college.</p>
<p>As for that student whose taking Math 25 as a high school senior was so cavalierly dismissed as not impressive? He received the prize for best performance in his field at graduation, beating IMO medalists in his cohort. Clearly, the adcoms’ faith in his potential was amply justified.</p>
<p>Don’t know if he got into H or just chose to go to MIT instead. I know he was invited to interview for the AB Duke scholarship but instead opted to go for the Young Epidemiology scholarship instead. My D was in the same situation and decided to go for the former.Both these coincided on the same dates in Apr 2008.</p>