Moscow

Tag: Moscow

A grave note

Канторович
Photo by Tim Dahlstrom © 2015

I had coffee with Tim Dahlstrom ’16 a couple of days ago, which is not very unexpected, except that we had it in a cafe with a view on the Kremlin. I am here visiting family, and he is here practicing his Russian and prepping for the GRE. He shared with me afterwards this photo, which he recently took here in Moscow: It is the grave of a Nobel prize-winning mathematical economist, obviously from Russia. This should probably be enough for you to guess the name, but if you need more, here is a cogent Austrian perspective on his prize. Tim remembered him from the Red Plenty reading group from his freshman year.

Are you smarter than an 8th grader (from Moscow)?

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You can find out by giving these problems a try. For comparison, here is an 8th grade contest from Math League, which I am not familiar with at all.It definitely wins in the cool pictures category. I suppose you wouldn’t want 8th graders to get bored while solving math problems in a competition. (There is a nontrivial risk of boredom, actually.) To be fair, one can find much better math competition problems in the US, like this one, called Abacus. By a remarkable coincidence, “[t]he program is based on a printed journal for gifted students, originating in Hungary over 100 years ago.”