Seattle Seventh Grader Wins National Math Bee (ap.org) 106
Edward Wan, a Seattle-based seventh grader has won the national math bee. Wan, who studies at Lakeside Middle School, beat 224 other middle school students nationwide to win the 2016 Raytheon Mathcounts National Competition. From an Associated Press report: Competition officials said in a news release the 13-year-old won the final round by answering the question, "What is the remainder when 999,999,999 is divided by 32?" Wan gave the correct answer of 31 In just under seven seconds.Deadspin reports about the live streaming of the event: Today's Mathcounts national championship for middle-school mathletes aired on ESPN3, and it was definitely the best live sports anyone could be watching at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning. We couldn't agree more.
Asian privilege (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not faaaaaaaaaair!
We need a safe space for kids who can't spell. Other than the comment threads at Salon.com, that is.
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We need a safe space for kids who can't spell.
Seattle Seventh Grader Wins National Math Bee
Please re-read the headline.
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Re:Asian privilege (Score:5, Interesting)
When you get to the 999,999,999/13 part ...
It is 999,999,999/32. The 13 is his age. The problem is not so hard. 1,000,000,000 is 10^9 = 2^9*5^9, and 32=2^5, so obviously 1,000,000,000 is evenly divisible by 32, so one less is going to have a remainder of 31. Duh.
I don't know much about the Math Bee, but I coach kids for the Math Olympiad, and we do a lot of drills to break numbers down into prime factors, and rapidly compute powers of two. Solving a problem like this in seven seconds is impressive, but not uncommon for a kid that has been trained.
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We have that.
It's called Twitter.
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You think you're being funny.
All you're really being is racist.
Or at least making a racist joke.
And you don't even comprehend how or why it is.
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You think you're being funny.
All you're really being is racist.
The funny thing is that he isn't even a competent racist. He has his stereotypes all mixed up: Indians win spelling bees (10 of the last 14), Chinese win math competitions. Since Edward is Chinese, it was silly to think this was a spelling bee.
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I find it rather interesting that among asians most of these math competitions are Chinese participation, while Koreans, Japanese...have considerably less representation.
It is considerably harder for a Chinese citizen to emigrate to America, compared to South Koreans or Japanese. So the Chinese who work through the process and come here tend to be competitive, hard working, and well educated.
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I find it rather interesting that among asians most of these math competitions are Chinese participation, while Koreans, Japanese...have considerably less representation.
Affluence. The Ashkenazi Jews have an even higher bell-curve, and greater numbers in the US. Like the Koreans and Japanese, todays parents grew up to comfortable to devote the necessary hours to win a childs maths/spelling bee. China still has countless millions in poverty, and the grandparents remember millions dying of starvation. That's a good motivator.
Slow day in sports (Score:2)
Must have been a slow day for sports. Given that there's international sports, you should probably be able to find something interesting to watch at any time of the day. Maybe the Giro D'Italia shouldn't have had a rest day.
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Wow, a European cycling race that is NOT the Tour de France got a random mention in a /. comment.
My life is complete.
PS: The Giro can often be much more entertaining than the TdF.
Not Math (Score:2)
Arithmetic. Americans seem unable to tell the difference (no pun intended).
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Well since Arithmetic is a subset of Math, they were in fact practicing Math.
Pedantry is usually unnecessary when discussing a middle school event, unless you're trying to shoehorn in an "Americans suck" joke.
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http://grammarist.com/spelling... [grammarist.com]
Perhaps you should keep saying it, since it seems the grammarians disagree with you.
Oh, and keep tilting at those windmills, maybe some day you will win a battle...lol
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Especially differential equations from Arabic!
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0508/Differential-equation-prompts-economist-s-removal-from-flight-video [csmonitor.com]
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Arithmetic. Americans seem unable to tell the difference
Nope. Three problems:
(1) Arithmetic is a PART of mathematics.
(2) Even if you want to insist it's not, the Mathcounts competition includes all sorts of stuff including basic geometry, basic algebra, probability, combinatorics, basic number theory, etc. NOT just arithmetic.
(3) If you think this kid solved that problem by basic "arithmetic" like division in 7 seconds, you're crazy. It requires an understanding of basic divisibility theory (i.e., part of number theory) to see certain patterns. For exa
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Generalizability, no, but you can get there with the basic divisibility rules they do teach in middle school. Multiples of 100 are divisible by 4, multiples of 1,000 are divisible by 8. 32=8x4, so you just need a multiple of 100,000.
While that's true, I think it already requires one generalization that most middle-school kids don't realize, i.e., that you can effectively "multiply" the requirements for divisibility rules to obtain rules for higher numbers.
(In middle school, some kids realize this about 6 -- which is usually taught to encompass the rules for 2 and for 3. A Mathcounts kid might also learn how to use this for divisibility by 12 or 15, etc. But I think it takes a little extra leap of logic to do what you did. Either w
Maths B not A (Score:2)
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Arithmetic. Americans seem unable to tell the difference (no pun intended).
You must be American.
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They then had a pyramid style competition to determine the individual winner. Our teammate was one of the last two standing. In the final, he buzzed in too early on multiple occasions (had to wait until they were done reading the question) and was DQ'd from answering that question. He knew the answer before the question was done. The other kid then had 30 seconds to work out it
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I started taking a foreign language class last night, & the teacher had only gone over certain letters. She started to write a word & then erased it because we had not learned one of the letters, but from past experience (I know the entire alphabet & a handful of words), I figured out what the rest of the word was from just the first 2 letters.
One obvious thing about 999,999,999 is that it is one less than 1 billion. So the most likely choices for divisor are those that are powers of 2 or 5. (3,
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Prakash Kumar Badalababoom.
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That one can actually spell.
10^10 (Score:1)
"What is 10^10-1 mod 32?"
We start by checking if we can divide 1^10 by 2, five times (as 2^5=32) : 5x10^5, 2.5x10^5, 1.25x10^5, 6.25x10^4 and 3.125x10^4. The answer is yes, thus 10^10 mod 32 = 0, and 10^10-1 mod 32 = 31.
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It's even easier than that. You can divide by 2^n evenly if something is a multiple of 10^n. Since n=5, 10^9 can be divided by 32 evenly, leaving you with a remainder of 31 when you subtract 1. Memorize enough simple rules and you can solve problems based around simple rules in mere seconds.
Quick kid (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Quick kid (Score:4, Insightful)
He probably did what I have done at that age. 1,000,000,000 by 32 is 500,000,000 by 16 is 250,000,000 by 8 is 125,000,000 by 4 is 62,500,00 by 2 is ...doesn't matter but it is divisible without remainder. So one less means that 31 must be left.
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The difference between people who are good at math and people who win math competitions is the ability to make educated guesses on the fly. Once you see enough problems that look difficult but turn out to be trivial when viewed in the right context, you start looking for that context instead of trying to calculate the answer.
Uh, the whole point of Mathcounts is to encourage middle-school students to think on a more "abstract" level. They actively WANT you to do "tricks" to solve the problems. For this purpose, they aren't "tricks" nor for that matter was this answer likely an "educated guess." It's only a trivial problem if you know a little basic number theory and can see a pattern.
ALL of the kids who had gotten to the final round of this competition would have realized that they did NOT want them to calculate the answe
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I believe its even easier than that, if you know the divisibility rules to determine divisibility quickly.
and these math whiz's probably learn almost all of them.
among them is "any multiple of 100k (so that it ends with x00,000) is divisible by 32".
therefore 1B is divisible by 32.
so 1 less should have a remainder of 31.
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Now, quick, what is the remainder of 999,999,999 divided by 31?
Go MathCounts! (Score:1)
My son competed in MathCounts as an 8th grader a number of years ago. Made it to the nationals in Texas, where he finished in the middle of the pack.
I went there with him, and even though I was just a parent (with an MS in math), I took it upon myself to assist the guy coaching our state's team. For two days, Coach and I escorted those four intelligent, lively, funny young people (one girl, three boys) to a barbecue, a science museum, and I forget where all else. The other kids' parents stayed at the hot
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My son's shagging a very cute native Peruvian. *sighs* The daughter finished med school so she's done well. The boy child? Well... He's not hurting anyone, there's that.
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Mod parent up!
I'm shocked! (Score:4, Funny)
Not a sport (Score:1)
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You tell my boss that his beloved golf is no real sport.
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It's not a sport. It's a competition. Sports by definition require an element of physical exertion.
Areyou trying to make sport of him?
Chess? (Score:2)
Chess (and checkers, even if only 10x10) are generally regarded as sport [olympic.org]. Even poker might be [go.com]...
Brain is part of the body and exerting it more often makes you a good sport... So to speak...
Solvable in 1 second. (Score:5, Informative)
10^n is evenly divisible by 2^n
Therefore 999,999,999 = 10^9-1. Therefore the remainder is -1 mod 32 which = 31.
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It's not a formal proof. I think the rest of it is essentially instinctual. But fine.
If x is divisible by y, then mx is also divisible by y, for all integers x, y, and m.
10^x = 10^y * 10^z when x = y + z.
Therefore, if 10^n is evenly divisible by 2^n, it follows that 10^m is evenly divisible by 2^n for all integers m > n.
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*cough*
Praise be to Bush?.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Though TFA talks about a national competition, last year the American team has won the international Math Olympiad [npr.org]. For the first time in 21 years too.
Maybe, Bush's hated ideas of accountability [ed.gov] for schools and teachers weren't entirely bad? Neah, can't be...
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That winning team includes three Asian names, and a head coach and assistant coach each with an Asian name. I don't think that the team is winning because educational standards went up.
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That such a coach became a teacher and got into this position — despite the lingering [usatoday.com] anti-Asian bigotry [asian-nation.org] — may itself be thanks to increases in accountability... School-principals and fellow teachers may still dislike them, but have to weight that dislike against their school quantifiably falling behind in Math.
Same may be true about the pupils themselves. They are still bullied [nydailynews.com], but, mayb
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Lakeside is the most expensive/exclusive private school in Seattle. Notable alumni include Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Gates was wealthy before Microsoft - his father is a prominent local attorney.)
So this story has exactly zero to do with Bush's education initiatives.
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if you use pre-shellshock patch bash, world may own you
Too easy (Score:2)
It should take less than 7 seconds to realize that 32 divides 1 billion evenly, so the answer is -1 mod 32. (Not the crappy truncate towards zero C kind of mod).
Great idea! (Score:1)