El éxitoso sistema educativo de la unión soviética.

lambdaphage 7 hours ago | link
I'm always surprised when reading the notes of scientists and mathematicians working in previous centuries to see just how steeped they were in synthetic geometry. This was taken to an extreme in the case of the Principia, but one can't read Gibbs or Maxwell either without realizing that they felt Euclid in their bones in a way that few people do today, with possible exceptions for mathematicians trained under the Soviet system.

atmosx 7 hours ago | link
Why are the mathematicians trained under the Soviet regime an exception?

lambdaphage 7 hours ago
I don't know-- usually the answer to such questions about academic priorities is "because it was cheaper", but they just seemed to emphasize geometry much more at the K-12 level. It's a generalization, of course, but a pretty robust one. One of my professors came from Kazakhstan, and once casually remarked that a certain problem on a homework set was "impossible unless you were Russian", since the proof was easy if you knew a certain proposition from Euclid, but extremely tedious without it.

EDIT: this interview with Izaac Wirzsup comparing the Soviet and US systems confirms my prejudice:

Another extremely harmful antiestéticature
of [the US] school mathematics programs
is that only about half of our students
take geometry, and for only one
year, generally in a concentrated high
school course. Students cannot be
expected to master the material taught
in this way. Moreover, they are not
being taught solid geometry, and they
rarely have a workable perception of
three-dimensional space, which is so
essential for studying science,
technical drawing, or engineering.
Soviet children study geometry
extensively for ten years, including
two years of solid geometry.

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Scarus Coerulus dijo:

Un país que inculcaba a la gente desde la escuela el amor por el arte [...]

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