Yes, yes, I know -- but are they creative? ;-)
China took the gold medal in 2008 the 49th International Mathematical Olympiad (July 10th to 22nd, 2008 - Madrid, Spain) link
Russians came in 2nd by very small margin. USA came in 3rd with the help of Asian students such as Alex Zhai who got a perfect score of 42, along with other two students from China. (Big surprise is where have the Indian students gone? Maybe in the SpellingBees? :-)
China also took the gold medal in the 39th International Physics Olympiad (2008) - Hanoi, Vietnam (28/07). All of its participants got Gold medals. Canada and US team members are also mostly Chinese. Taiwan is in second place. link
At 2008 the 40th Chemistry Olympiads held in Budapest, Hungary on July 21, 2008, all 4 Chinese students got gold medals, again China in 1st place.
link
I don't think the question is if they are creative, but if they will be allowed to be creative while staying in China.
ReplyDeleteKinda suprising that Israel doesn't do better.
ReplyDeleteChina wins the math olympiad because the USSR splintered. The combined fSU team would still kick ass, and with a much lower population than the PRC. In the same vein, back when they were communist, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, produced enormous numbers of gold medals relative to population, and often won the competition outright.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese dominance in the academic contests is not much different than the communist dominance of various (athletic) olympic specialties back in the day.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteThough slightly unrelated to this post's topic, this text is kind of interesting (in a scary way, that is):
I was driven mad by the Chinese education system