Well, the last day. Wow. It’ll be getting on a plane soon. To solve the jetlag problem, rather than go to bed at midnight after the long dinner, I plan to stay up till 4am when the bus comes to take us to the airport. If I stay awake until I’m on the plane at 7am (Moscow time), that’s 8pm (Pacific time) and that would be a great time to go to sleep. We’ll see if it works.
(More computer problems, argh! Something’s really wrong in there. The fan is erratic – maybe a CPU battery problem? I dunno.)
This morning was nice: some time to talk among ourselves (the Americans, that is) about plans for the future, and who has money to fund them. It may well be that we end up with some workshops for teachers and some translated Russian textbooks among other things. I think I may learn a bit of Russian myself, enough to translate math anyway, not that I want to go to work doing that (for one thing, the Russians will do it for much cheaper than I’d be willing to, and I’m sure their English will always be better than my Russian), but just because it’ll be fun to visit math.ru and mccme.ru and the various online problem databases and things like that. I think it’ll be a while before the ten thousand or so online problems get translated!
We went to the famous school #2 this morning. Kids were working on a “math battle” – more on that below – but we didn’t get to talk to them, we were too busy talking to the administrators. We learned a lot of the history of the Gel’fand correspondence school, which was interesting to compare to our new internet correspondence school-like things, like EPGY.stanford.edu and artofproblemsolving.com .
Then lunch at My-My restaurant (pronounced Moo-Moo, and indeed it’s the sound a cow makes in Russian, as you’ll see from the photos when I get them uploaded). Great place: cafeteria-style restaurant, lots of choices of salads and main courses and beverages. We’ve eaten there, what, three times now? Yeah. It’s obviously the favorite restaurant of the MCCME, and that’s OK. It’s fine Russian food and not too expensive. I’ve grown rather used to Russian food – and it has much less sour cream than I expected. I’m ready to eat at Cinderella in San Francisco any day.
In the afternoon, we heard more from Alexander Sossinsky (who lived in New York for a number of years, so he speaks completely unaccented English – well, no Russian accent anyway, and actually not much of a NY accent). He talked about one of their more interesting summer programs and got us set up for the math battle.
I got to be on the jury for the math battle! (Luckily the kids spoke English: while my Russian is a lot better than it was a week ago, what that means is that I can count to ten successfully most of the time). So, here’s how a math battle works: This morning, two teams of kids (specially assembled for us: a mix of kids from different schools, based on English skills instead of a team all from one school selected just purely for math ability, though these kids were darn good at math too and I don’t say that lightly!) … um, two teams of kids get a set of 8 problems. Six kids per team. They work on the problems for a few hours. Then they come to the battle. We flip a coin and team #1 wins the toss. They choose to receive. Team Yellow (the other team’s name) asks them to prove question #3. Team #1 accepts the challenge. Then one representative from the team goes to the board (for the 8 problems, each person can speak at most twice, so you need to spread the knowledge around the team). A challenger from the other team also goes to the board. Team #1’s player writes the solution (or proof) for the problem. Meanwhile, team #2’s player can interrupt with questions trying to probe at places where team #1’s player doesn’t understand some of the details, or even better, catch the team #1 player in an outright mistake. Then, when the proof is done, and the challenger is out of questions, the challenger sits down and the jury gets our turn to ask the questions (that’s me! And two other Americans, and two Russians who both have pretty fluent English, Sossinsky and Tanya Kutuzova). Finally the jury assigns the points: 12 points to be distributed among presenter, challenger, and jury (!) depending on how good the proof was.
Now imagine being a Russian math student, solving these pretty hard problems, and then presenting your solutions like that -- at the board, in front of everyone -- in English, not your first language. And they couldn't bring notes, or anything: all from memory. In English. In front of the "honored American guests", and lots of the most famous mathematicians and math teachers of your own country. Pretty bold people: some tough kids!
It was lots of fun and Sam Vandervelde is trying to figure out how to organize something like it locally – maybe structured a bit more like a debate tournament or something.
Finally, we had a few closing remarks, mostly focusing on internet resources that might help us continue the collaboration (and, even more usefully, borrow Russian problems! I need to learn how to read first though …). And the beautiful etudes web site with its amazing math cartoons. And then an amazing banquet dinner. Fish! Caviar! Meat! Salads! Wine (they mostly serve wine from Spain and suchlike, not so much Napa) and vodka and you name it. Great party. Then a few of us went down to the metro (beautiful metro stations, and trains running every few minutes even past midnight on Sunday), got off at Kievskaya station, walked across the beautiful glassed-in footbridge that I’ve been gazing longingly at all week, walked along the river back to the hotel. Now 2am, and no real point in going to sleep since (1) I want to switch back to Pacific time, and 2am here = 3pm Pacific, and (2) the bus comes at 4am to take me to the airport and I haven’t packed yet. So, a last phone call home to burn through the remaining minutes on the Russian phone card I bought, a shower, packing, and off to the airport…
Do you have an email where I can contact you about what you've learned?
I'm very interested!
Posted by: Myrtle | January 07, 2007 at 03:14 PM