Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition by Steve Olson. Houghton Mifflin, $24, 244 pages.

The Chapel Hill News

October 10, 2004

The toughest Olympics

By Phillip Manning

Every year, almost half a million high school students participate in the American Mathematics Competitions. Those who do well on the tests take a grueling series of exams of ever increasing difficulty. Eventually, the top six are selected to represent the United States in the International Mathematical Olympiad. But the toughest competition starts when these kids compete against nearly 500 of the best high school mathematicians from 82 other countries.

What makes these youngsters special is the question science writer Steve Olson addresses in his insightful book about the 2001 Olympiad, “Count Down: Six Kids Vie for Glory at the World’s Toughest Math Competition” (Houghton, Mifflin; $24). Well, for starters, they are smart, talented, and well schooled. Typical of the group was Oaz Nir, who was born in New Orleans after his parents immigrated from Israel. He began his education in public school, but he was such a precocious student that his parents recognized he needed greater challenges. After the fifth grade, he transferred to the academically rigorous St. Andrews Episcopal School near Jackson, Mississippi. Oaz’s talent for math was apparent. “We had to think of things to keep him busy,” said Marcia Whatley, his sixth grade math teacher. “He taught me as much as I taught him.”

The next year, Oaz finished first in the Mississippi Mathcounts, a test for middle school students, but wound up in the middle of the pack in national competition. The following year he worked hard, reading college level textbooks, and improved his standing to 18th in the country. A year later, he was invited to take an advanced math exam for high school students. He placed in the top two dozen in the nation. All of these tests require high-level problem-solving skills. To compare your own skills to those of some really sharp high school students, a typical question from the test that Oaz aced is given at the end of this column.

Oaz’s chances to make the Olympiad team improved when his family moved to the San Francisco Bay area. The family’s diligent search for the right school landed Oaz in Monte Vista High School, an academic hothouse in the heart of Silicon Valley. Oaz fit right in, studying math, getting an ear pierced, dressing California cool. He qualified for the 2000 Olympiad in his junior year, and won a gold medal in Seoul, South Korea. The U.S. team placed third in the competition, behind China and Russia.

The 2001 Olympiad was held in Arlington, Virginia. Oaz again qualified for the team, but he was not expected to get the best score. Two other American hotshots, Reid Barton and Gabriel Carroll, who had also won gold medals in Seoul, had excelled in the training camp for the Olympiad. But Oaz, Olson writes, “with his casual good looks and easygoing nature” was designated the spokesman for the team. Unfortunately, no one told Oaz. During a team interview on the television show “Good Morning America,” Oaz thought Gabe Carroll would be asked a difficult math question. Instead, the interviewer posed the question to Oaz. “How can you use a nineteen-degree angle to construct a one-degree angle?” The 17-year-old Oaz hesitated. He could make a fool of himself on national television. Then he answered the question, completely and accurately. Oaz’s answer is too long to give here, but you can find it on page 149 in Olson’s book.

How could Oaz come up with the correct answer to this question under pressure? More generally, how could Oaz and the other team members, all high school students, solve the even harder problems they faced at the Olympiad, problems that most professional mathematicians could not work through in the allotted time? Is it hard work or talent? Is it supportive parents, excellent schools, or bred-in-the-bone smarts? Is it nature or nurture? Olson examines both possibilities and concludes that it is both. Oaz is a natural at math, easily picking up difficult concepts on his own. But he also benefitted from good schools and doting parents. He worked hard, too. As scientists are discovering about many human traits, genius is a product of complex feedback relationships between genes and environment that are almost impossible to tease apart. In the end, we may never pin down what made Oaz and his teammates mathematical whizzes. But we can admire and respect them and their results. In the 2001 Olympiad, Oaz settled for a silver medal, but the United States team tied Russia for second place, just behind the Chinese.

Here is a question similar to those that Oaz answered in high school. “How many of the integers between 1 and 1,000, inclusive, can be expressed as the difference of the squares of two nonnegative integers?”
E-mail me with the solution, and I will list your name in a later column.
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