Citadel Supports Math Olympiads

All this clicking on Olympiad articles and finance stories prompted a story about Citadel supporting math Olympiad competitions to story to show up on my feed.

I'm not someone who thinks much about billionaires, real or fake, I don't read their autobiographies, and I don't engage in the hero worship which is now so common.

That said, thank God for Ken Griffin, who seems to value and respect mathematics. His company Citadel has given and is still giving money to support Olympiad students around the world including poor students.

From the article,

"There's only one problem: the training. Few people succeed at Olympiads without training and tuition, and that is more likely to be available to the kinds of students who apply for Citadel's $20k a month internships anyway. It's also more likely to be on offer if you live in countries like Russia or China that have a long history of preparing students for Olympiad success. 

Citadel and Citadel Securities are seeking to remedy this. On Sunday, International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), announced a donation from the firms to support training camps for students from low income countries."

My only suggestion is that while the US may not be a low income country, there are plenty of low income students right here in the good old US of A that could probably benefit from such training as well: poor whites, poor Latinx people, poor blacks, poor US Asians, and poor Native Americans.

Finally, since so many of the wealthy lack any sort of sense of civic duty, I want to thank Ken Griffin for fixing the Chicago lakefront bike path before he left for Florida and took Citadel with him. Not sure I would have chosen Florida given all of the obvious and non-obvious risks and the book banning however.