India at the Mathematical Olympiad
The International Mathematical Olympiad has a simple format. Six students from each country solve six problems each with a maximum of seven marks each. The perfect score is a Douglas Adams like 42. Usually, solving five problems gets one a gold, solving three gets a silver and solving two gets a bronze. Solving just one problem gets a honourable mention.
Students with perfect scores (just a gold medal will not do), have gone on to win Fields medals, Nevanlinna prizes and Godel prizes in mathematics.
What is India’s recent record at this Olympiad? Pathetic. We sent a contingent of six students to Madrid in 2008 and they came back with five bronzes and a honourable mention. India was ranked 31st among all countries. Who was first? China. The last time India won a gold was in 2001. Were we not supposed to be better at all things intellectual when compared to the Chinese? Maybe all we are good at is outsourcing the west’s back-offices.
So, what gives? We have a National Board of Higher Mathematics (NBHM) which conducts Regional Olympiads, National Olympiads and so on to finally select the six students to represent India. Professors from IITs and IIsc offer postal coaching to students for a year and a month long on-site coaching. Various professors have written books, presumably solving old Olympiad papers to train the students.
Clearly this is not working. One look at old Olympiad papers shows that the problems are tough, but not very tough. There are many in India who can do all six. But, they are not going to the Olympiad, they are busy preparing for their engineering entrance exams.
What can be done? One could simply abolish the National Board of Higher Mathematics and its Olympiad exams. I am sure they are making a case right now for the department to get more funds after the nuclear deal, as it is under the department of atomic energy for some obscure reason.
The solution: Just pick up the top six rankers in the IIT Joint entrance exam, train them for the month or so using the few professors who have solved some tough problems, and send them to the Olympiad.
That would be a much better than this elaborate charade for five bronzes. I forgot that honourable mention certificate? Stick it up the ………… of the senior professor who led the team this year. Fear is a great motivator. Look at China.
There is a clear correlation between the few gold medallists India has and the toppers in the IIT entrance exam. While correlation is not causality, a system that seems to work in selecting the brightest students in the country need not be supplanted by one that is clearly selecting morons to be trained by other morons.
Tags: 42, India, Mathematics Olympiad, NBHM
October 1st, 2008 at 10:39 am
You are clearly an elitist. Are you saying non-engineering kids are not competent enough? I am praying that jagadguru rips this apart and calls you names.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:01 am
I am more elitist than that. I am saying that if you dont have a single digit rank in the JEE (preferably in the first 6), you are not good enough.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:28 am
Nice article. Made me go back to reading what an acute angle triangle is
October 1st, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I think one of my classmates was selected for argentina or india olympiad. Must have been 96 or so. He was a smart kid, and even had a paper published then. He did not show up on the day of JEE and was instead participating in some event in TIFR. He even joined medical school. Nobody knows what happened to him since, though there are rumors that he fell terminally ill.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Looks like he didnt show up at the argentina or india olympiads either.
http://www.iisc.ernet.in/mocell/ lists those who did.
His paper is nice and short though.
I remember a mathematician named Aravind who slept with his wife only on prime numbered days. He killed her later and is in jail somewhere in the US. Erdos talks of him (his mathematics) approvingly somewhere.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:04 pm
The guy I am talking about died of brain tumor in late 2000. He wasn’t married either.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
The strongest team India ever sent was in 1998, which won three golds and three silvers. That team did have its share of JEE rankers but many teams dont. In my year (2000, I made it to the second last level), of the 6 who went there was a rank 19, rank 100-something and a few other double digit rankers. One, however, was a JEE rank 883 (in the following year, because he was still in the 11th standard) and another never took the JEE.
The problem with your solution is that you have the causality the other way round. The kids who make it are great at math, so it’s reasonable to assume that they will be good at physics and chemistry and so near-max it at JEE. Many kids who max it at JEE, however, have no interest in number theory, combinatorics, graph theory and inequalities, and these form the bread and butter of INMO and IMO questions.
Plus, math is the only olympiad that regularly sends teams made up of people who are not yet in their 12th - the absence of calculus from the curriculum of olympiads and the absence of number theory from the JEE curriculum may explain why. JEE rankers are thus a bad proxy.
The problem, actually, comes from the fact that most people who make it to the team these years are from this coaching institute in Pune called Bhaskar Pratishthana. Like all coaching institute trained students, these guys are masters of pattern recognition, and hence crack the INMO and IMOTC level tests that they have been exposed to. However, the IMO manages to spring a few surprises every year, and hence these kids don’t do so well.
The IMO can also be reduced (like all exams) to pattern recognition, but to do that needs state level (or similar in magnitude) drive and support and the discipline of russian gymnasiums. Ergo, China.
By the way, do check out the correlation between physics olympiad veterans and JEE ranks. Then you will realise the effect of the fact that Math olympiad has a vastly different course than the +2 level math we learn in schools.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I must also mention that the smartest kid I ever saw (Swarnendu Datta) never won anything more than a bronze, and inferior talents have won golds. Datta was 2 years my junior, which basically meant that when he topped the training camp (IMOTC) in 2000, the rest of the Indian team was 3 years older. In the 5 selection tests, I had a cumulative score of 37/190. Swarnendu had 145.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Your first comment, first two sentences. Read them again.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Yuck! Two idiots arguing. avataram an idiot because a) he just does not understand the timeline of the INMO, IMOTC, IMO and JEE. By the time one clears the JEE, it is too late to prepare for something as tough as the IMO, b) he clearly has never taken part in IMO nor does he understand the nature of the exam vis-a-vis the JEE. Excessive preparation for the JEE actually hampers the ability to solve IMO-type problems. His solution is akin to taking the winners of an IPL-chhaap tournament and sending them to play Australia in a 5-test series.
Ritwik is an idiot for counter-arguing idiotically. 1998 is actually one year avataram could somewhat use in support of his idiotic argument. Abhinav Kumar - won a gold, and was AIR-1 in JEE. But to understand the idiocy of avataram’s argument, look at 2 other names in the top 6 in the 1998 JEE AIR (dont wanna take their names here, but folks from those years will know) who were at IMOTC. Didn’t make it to the team. And didn’t deserve to make it, as they will agree.
On the other hand, there is Chetan Balwe. Silver in 1997, Gold in 1998, attended Bhaskaracharya Pratisthan (calling it a “coaching institute” - another sign of ritwik being an insufferable idiot) in Pune. Didn’t even touch the JEE. Stuck to the world of Math. Is still in Math. Google tells me he is at UPitt these days. And he is more likely than any other JEE topper types to win a Fields medal.
The contents of this thread so far are exactly what you would expect from a debate about a complex topic between two idiots who don’t even understand it - some dog eared nri with a rudimentary understanding of math whose rants even the most penniless whore won’t be willing to hear for a million bucks. and another, the typical bottom-feeder from INMO/IMOTC who realized his limitations, stuck to mugging up for IIT, then floated into an IIM, and is now eyeing wall street.
You wanna know why India doesn’t do well at IMO? Precisely because of idiots like you two.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:36 pm
sheesh,
The first two lines of my first comment were information, not argument. My argument is in the rest of the comment, which you apparently failed to read.
And BP is, for all its claims of trying to teach beautiful mathematics to people, a coaching institute no more. In fact, they’d do better if they took the ‘beauty’ out the whole process and stuck to maximizing our chances at the olympiad.
By the way, I must tell you, your inclination to argue from Google and secrecy makes you the third idiot apart form the NRI and the bottom feeder. Welcome to the club.
October 2nd, 2008 at 5:21 am
Lot of passion there, wish you had shown that in winning a gold. But like you, let me not shoot the messenger(s).
What is your solution? That kids in pune wake up at 6am, wear khakhi shorts, do vishram savdhan for one hour and then learn vedic mathematics at BP? A fine haul of gold medals that has given us.
And NV Tejaswi, who is working on the Birch Swinnerton Dyer conjecture is a better bet for the next fields than Balwe, who is still struggling with his Ph.d or postdoc. At Pittsburgh.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:59 am
avataram, atha free ya vudunga. Was Gandhi a brahmin? Why are all these kids wearing the poonal? Some even wear it ‘valam’. Are they doing tharpanam?
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Ritwik, your pattern matching observation is great. RMO and INMO ( at least the ones I have seen ) are all trivial once you have certain basic knowledge.
I too went to the training camp but didn’t make it to the team ( so we will have several common friends ). Another observation at IMOTC was that the coaching was by no means structured - just several problems are worked out - the sessions were by no means illuminating or tailored to sharpen problem solving skills. What many of my friends and I used to do were to search in a large strategy space - probe several familiar strategies. If we were lucky we would pick out the strategy which leads to a solution.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Aren’t there only two chances to make it to the camp ? (once as junior and once as senior? ) E.g the guys to last win gold medas in 2001, jha and sarkar gave JEE one year later in 2002. Jha had a rank of ~30 in JEE and sarkar had 6. once chose ISI kolkotta, the other iitb and so it goes.
I seem to remember that these guys didnt qualify for the team in 2002.
@sheesh …. better be a bottom feeder amongst the best, than be the best amongst bottom feeders.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Let’s see what happened to the person who was ragged to death in my class and was not even considered very bright by peers. He is now bothered about Databases.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~mvnak/cv.pdf
MVN was brighter than I ever was or will be — but he was not the best in my class. Yet, he qualifies on Avataram’s 6th rank in JEE criterion. The brightest in that class of ‘98 is now a crack addict or something. That’s not even the point. The point is, shut up, idiots.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Why do you think that Madhu Sudan would leave his research at MIT and come to India to teach Math. olympiad kids? What incentive does he have in doing that? Same goes for Manindra Agrawal.
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
As an addition to stupidity here, let me add this.
I do not know how research in Mathematics works in India. But graduate students who go to American Universities are more often than not piled with teaching responsibilities that ensure they will hardly make any meaningful progress in their research in the first two years. Unless one is exceptionally gifted and perseveres to the next level, the graduate student’s research is bound to be mediocre.
Maybe Amit Varma will campaign for change in funding practices in research assistant positions. In ‘08 Presidential race, that is.
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:14 pm
I don’t know about others, but this idiot Ritwik gives me a headache.
Here is your warning — either be stupid knowing you are or shut up. Else, go lark around Sabnis.
October 3rd, 2008 at 6:39 am
Oho … I think you love me.
October 5th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Fundamental question: Why should India do well at Maths Olympiad ?