surpassed

[totient]

My high school has a math and science student the likes of whom has not been seen in a generation. This student is a freshman and last year (as an 8th grader) won the award which is customarily given to the best math student in the 11th grade. Oh, and also second place in the California State Science Fair. Follow that link and you'll see why I think this is especially cool.

Comments

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Impressive!

[jered]

Neat project.

Is the reason you find this especially cool related to a prior area of interest to you, or because the student in question is female?

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Definitely that the student in question is female.

My HS, which was all-boys until the late 1970s, was still 2/3 male when I was there. Even then, we had more than our share of female math and science prodigies, and I continue to be glad to see someplace besides MIT (which has a strong enough applicant base that it can select for non-academic factors without compromising its academics) showing some effectiveness at beating our cultural biases against women in math and science.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

biology is actually the only scientific field that's already achieved gender parity. so while i'm delighted at this student's achievements, she's not showing any particularly unusual behavior by gender.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Except that she's also kicking ass all over the math department.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

which is lovely, but not entirely unusual in an eighth grader. i don't at all want to diminish her accomplishments -- she sounds like an amazing student -- but the gender gap in learning increases from year to year throughout education, all the way through graduate school.

(nota bene, as a retired girl "mathematically precocious youth" myself, i am faintly allergic to the whole "prodigy" thang. it's all very lovely for the individual, of course, but we won't even begin to have done anything meaningful about the matter until the biases in general are addressed.)

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

In which case, I hope that she does indeed turn out to blossom into the first math student there who's better than I was, and I'll be keeping an eye out. Signs are good, though: I didn't win that prize until I was in the 9th grade. Part of my interest is to try to steer her, and the school, away from some mistakes I made which affected my impact on the mathematical world.

As to the prodigy thing: so much of math, meaning advancing the subject academically, is done by prodigies that I think we do have to focus there to affect the number of female math grad students.

As to the post-prodigy thing: Have you seen The Royal Tenenbaums? If not, I recommend it.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i have not seen "the royal tenenbaums" (i don't really watch movies much). thanks for the rec.

i wonder, from the combination of these things you've said, if this kid is heading for biology and you are hoping to steer her into doing more math? i'm all for polymaths, but just wondering.

i suspect most people who follow math into grad students are reasonably to be considered prodigies. however, by the time kids reach junior high school, highly accomplished boys outnumber girls seven to one (as of the last data i saw) and the gap just keeps on growing with every further year of education. which is mostly to say, eighth grade is pretty late in mathematically-developing life, and the fact that the gap grows from year to year is shameful.

my objection to focus on prodigies is that it takes a one-person approach to a society-wide problem. i think it's lovely that this girl is doing well and receiving awards. i also think that, statistically speaking, for each kid like that there are half a dozen girls who had equal potential to hers who have already been lost to mathematics. and that strikes me as the more important issue.