This is a rare politics post; I’ll try to keep this short and emotion-free. If parts of this are wrong, please correct me. More verbose explanations here, here, here, here, longer discussion here.

Suppose you are a math PhD student at MIT. Officially, this “costs” $50K a year in tuition. Fortunately this number is meaningless, because math PhD students serve time as teaching assistants in exchange for having the nominal sticker price waived. MIT then provides a stipend of about $25K a year for these PhD student’s living expenses. This stipend is taxable, but it’s small and you’d pay only $1K-$2K in federal taxes (about 6%).

The new GOP tax proposal strikes 26 U.S. Code 117(d) which would cause the $50K tuition waiver to also become taxable income: the PhD student would pay taxes on an “income” of $75K, at tax brackets of …

There’s a Mantra that you often hear in math contest discussions: “math olympiads are very different from math research”. (For known instances, see O’Neil, Tao, and others. More neutral stances: Monks, Xu.)

It’s true. And I wish people would stop saying it.

Every time I’ve heard the Mantra, it set off a little red siren in my head: something felt wrong. And I could never figure out quite why until last July. There was some (silly) forum discussion about how Allen Liu had done extraordinarily on math contests over the past year. Then someone says:

A: Darn, what math problem can he not do?!

B: I’ll go out on a limb and say that the answer to this is “most of the problems worth asking.” We’ll see where this stands in two years, at which point the answer will almost certainly change, but research …

This will be old news to most of the readership of this blog, but I realize I’ve never written it down, so time to fix that.

Fill in the blank

Let’s begin by playing a game of “fill in the blank”. Suppose that today, the director of secondary education at your high school says:

“___ students just have to suffer.”

This is not a pleasant sentence. Fill in that blank with a gender, and you’d be fired tomorrow morning. Fill in that blank with an ethnic group, and you’d be fired in an hour. Fill in that blank with “special needs”, and you’d be be sued. Heck, forget “___ students”, replace that with “You”. Can you see someone’s career flashing before their eyes? How could you possibly get away with saying that about any group of students?

Those 500 hours

“Smart students just have …

[EDIT 2018/03/05: This description seems significantly less accurate to me now than it did a few years ago, both because my views/values have changed substantially, and because SPARC has changed direction substantially since I attended as a junior counselor in 2015. I’ll leave it here as a reference, but should be taken with a grain of salt.]

I often get asked about what I learned from the SPARC summer camp. This is hard to describe and I never manage to give as a good of an answer as I want, so I want to take the time to write down something concrete now. For context: I attended SPARC in 2013 and 2014 and again as a counselor in 2015, so this post is long overdue (but better late than never).

(For those of you still in high school: applications for 2016 are now open, due March …

In high school, I hated English class and thought it was a waste of time. Now I’m in college, and I still hate English class and think it’s a waste of time. (Nothing on my teachers, they were all nice people, and I hope they’re not reading this.)

However, I no longer think writing itself is a waste of time. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be blogging, even about math. This post explains why I changed my mind.

1. Guts

My impression is that teachers in high school got it all wrong.

In high school, students are told to learn algebra because “we all use math every day”. This is obviously false, and somehow the students eventually are led to believe it.

You can’t actually be serious. Do people really think that knowing the Pythagorean Theorem will help in your daily life? I sure don’t, and …