Competition puts 2 and 2 together and gets geniuses

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

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“Are the workings of some minds really incomprehensible?” asks science writer Steve Olson in “Count Down,” his eminently readable book examining math whiz kids and the factors that shape intellectual brilliance. “Or do great achievements rely on straightforward extensions of everyday thinking and imagining? Can profound advances in the arts and sciences be analyzed in such a way as to reveal their origins? Or are some realms of experience shut off from us forever, hidden behind the tantalizing veil of ‘genius’?”

These kinds of questions form the core of Olson’s journey, following six high school students as they compete for coveted spots on the U.S. Olympiad Mathematics team, then go head-to-head against the top problem-solvers from around the world at the 2001 International Mathematical Olympiad in Washington, D.C., an event in which nearly 500 students from 83 countries competed.

This is no Algebra 101. The math questions these competitors are given are so difficult and require such a degree of creativity -- knowing geometric and algebraic formulas is in no way sufficient to figure out these mind-numbingly complex problems -- that “[m]ost professional mathematicians would not be able to solve these problems in the 4 1/2 hours available to the Olympians,” Olson tells us. Readers are taken inside the thought processes of these remarkable kids as they grapple for imaginative and unexpected ways to solve the problems.

Chosen from among nearly half a million American schoolchildren, many of whom are funneled through a national program called Mathcounts, the six competitors profiled don’t necessarily consider themselves geniuses -- maybe prodigies. Though some showed promise in math and creative approaches to problem solving as small children, others surprised themselves when they tried out in middle school at local math competitions. Olson (“Mapping Human History”) shows us that they’re mostly normal young kids, not the math nerds with slide rules in their shirt pockets we might expect. They spend downtime having fun and playing games with one another, enjoying rounds of Ultimate Frisbee, for instance. Four of the six play musical instruments and one is an all-star athlete.

None, Olson notes, is female.

Since 1974, the United States has sent 119 competitors to the yearly Olympiad, and only one girl has ever been a member of the U.S. team. Melanie Wood, a spirited college student who served as a team guide at the 2001 Olympiad, competed on the U.S. team in 1998 in Taiwan and 1999 in Bucharest. Olson profiles Wood and uses her story to raise questions about why girls don’t do better in math and to compare girls’ math achievements here and abroad. (Many other teams had female members at the 2001 Olympiad. “Of the 473 competitors -- representing probably the most talented group of young mathematicians in the world -- 28 were girls. That wasn’t a lot,” Olson writes, “but it was more than in many past competitions.”)

Besides covering the competition, he also looks into how math is taught in the United States (by rote) and compares the U.S. to countries that have succeeded in getting kids enthralled with creative mathematical problem solving; he thus examines cultural differences that bias some toward (or away from) math study.

What happens in the long run to kids like these? Olson also wonders, expanding his focus to include Math Olympians from earlier years and how they have fared. Child prodigies, he reminds us, eventually become ex-child prodigies. They must make several critical transitions if they are to become successful later. Precocious children who grow into thriving adults, he finds, have certain traits in common. They tend to have high levels of energy, oodles of curiosity, are hardworking and persistent, and enjoy a broad range of interests.

For math buffs, Olson’s explication of the Olympiad problems for that year, listed in the appendix with solutions and commentaries, will offer an extra level of understanding. One competitor chooses to use imaginary numbers to solve a particularly vexing problem, for example, and Olson explains in lay language what imaginary numbers are (square roots of negative numbers, for example) and how they work.

If, however, you suffer from severe math aversion, take heart. This book is more human interest than calculus textbook, more sink-your-teeth-into-them stories of kids, parents and coaches accomplishing astounding results than mathematical analyses. It is a fabulous examination into the elements of so-called genius and a look into the nature versus nurture debate that will transfix readers. Problem solving for these students, we come to see, is a game, a joy, and they relish their mathematical prowess while stumping the rest of us.

Ultimately, Olson comes to no hard and fast conclusion about what makes for such mathematical proficiency or how genius takes hold. Through his interactions with the whiz kids and the fun they find in problem solving, though, he extrapolates tentative answers. “By watching the Olympians solve mathematical problems,” he tells us, “it’s possible at least to glimpse the qualities that have produced humanity’s greatest triumphs.”