The U.S. won the math International Mathematical Olympiad last weekend for the first time in 21 years, edging out China with South Korea in third place. The victory was compared by some to the 1980 U.S. hockey victory of the Soviets, known as the "Miracle on Ice."
“This is a matter of national pride,” Team USA’s head coach, Po-Shen Loh, told The Washington Post. “One reason we are super excited is that for the past five years or so, we’ve been consistently second or third. It’s actually quite difficult to win. We are going up against a natural population disadvantage in the sense that China, which is the usual winner, has four times as many people.”
“Finally, to topple a country that should beat us by all expectations is a fantastic achievement for these six students,” said Loh, a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
The comparison to the 1980 hockey win is apt partly because the U.S. should be in the running every time, just given that it has the third largest population in the world, behind China and India, and is much more economically advanced than most large countries. After India are Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Nigeria. That means that even thought the U.S. lags in math on average, it has a vastly deeper pool to draw from than most competitive nations, China aside.
But the U.S. has lagged in math education, falling in the most recent international Program for International Student Assessment scores. The PISA spot tests internationally every three years among 65 of the world's developed countries. The U.S. 2012 scores placed 30th in math, Education Week reported.
Gender imbalances in math continue to puzzle and frustrate, as only two of the 12 team members this year were girls.
“That is actually something that one hopes will change,” Loh told NPR, noting that there were just two girls in the U.S. team at this year’s Olympiad. He added, “One might say, ‘Only two out of 12, that’s terrible.’ But I should say in many years, it was, unfortunately, zero.”
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