It's International Math Oympiad Time (IMO)!

Actually, the International Math Olympiad just finished and the US took 1st place. Yay! Obviously congratulations are in order and this is a real achievement for the students and their coaches. I liked math contests as a kid and I was OK at them, but I never got even close to this level of performance, so I respect the achievement. As with any activity, especially sports, you can appreciate it more when you actually tried to do it. If you are interested you can read more about the US IMO victory at the MAA website.

I would also like to thank the parents/grandparents of the team members for immigrating to the US.  It looks like mainly from Asia. I really mean that. I am also the child of an immigrant. My guess is that they also all went to excellent US high schools too, so their math teachers deserve credit as well. As I have always said, and my many readers are aware, the elite sector of US education is actually quite competitive.

As an aside, notice I did not say I'm the "proud" child of an immigrant above. Not proud or ashamed about it, I had nothing to do with it, and I don't understand why some people say they are proud/ashamed of stuff that they had nothing to do with and weren't the result of any effort on their part. I really don't get it, but I digress.

When I was a professor at Chicago State, I used to post stuff all over my door.  I always had the cover of the edition of the MAA focus magazine showing the Olympiad/Putnam winning teams, along with a slightly obnoxious scribbled note saying "Does anybody else notice a pattern here?"

Of course, the point was that these Putnam/Olympiad teams always look pretty much like the one shown in the above link. In particular, the "no blacks" rule is in effect. Most likely the no "visibly Latinx" rule is in effect as well.

What we are seeing is a snapshot of the creme-de-la-creme of the US pipeline around the midpoint which we can depict as follows as an associative array type of data structure. Not a dictionary, since the order is important here.

[

begin --> (parents who value education and math in particular helps greatly)

grammar school --> (math counts and other enrichment programs),

high school --> (local math contests, AIME, ARML, USAMO, IMO and other enrichment programs),

college --> (Putnam (too hard for most people) summer research opportunities),

grad school --> (classes, research),

end --> (faculty member/professional researcher)

]

If the first 3 stages don't go well, the last 3 probably won't happen in my experience, and, when they do anyway, that individual was probably exceptionally motivated and determined.

I'm not talking about myself as I had access to a fair amount of mathematical privilege.

Finally, while I do think Olympiad training, participation, and success, can be an important signal for success as a research mathematician, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition in my opinion. This can be a topic for another post however.