Comments on: Why Asians are Better at Math

By: EduMastermind » Blog Archive » Gladwell: Why are Asians better at math?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:20:51 +0000

[...] achievement, and the schools that are “oppressive, draconian environments”. Another blogger partly attributes it to the Chinese language, where numbers are more logically synthesised than in [...]

By: David

David — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:51:10 +0000

Math ability should be looked at after school. Should be more fields medalist.

By: WT

WT — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:22:01 +0000

I volunteer yearly at a state-wide math competition for grades 6-8. Allow me to toss some rough empirical observations out here: on a scale of 1-20, the asian kids consistently and uniformly scored strongly in this competition, between the 10-12 range. One kid, however, was head and shoulders above everyone (about 100 competitors) in math ability – scoring 15 – and he was jewish.

By: silverkris

silverkris — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:38:58 +0000

I think the reason a lot of Asians are concentrated in math and science has a lot to do with the language and cultural barriers perceived by Asian immigrants in America.

Math, science and engineering achievement is pretty easily documented and measurable, and it’s less subject to coloration about how well you speak English or with an accent. So other Asians take that clue and go that way because it’s seen as the path of least resistance. I don’t think it’s because Asians are supposedly inherantly better at math. I am Asian and I hate/suck at math and most of the hard sciences!

By: courageous kiwi

courageous kiwi — Sun, 06 May 2007 21:23:30 +0000

This is a response to “Jesse!”: mathematicians have been trying for decades to reduce spoken languages to language-independent grammars. None have succeeded. Your sentence applies to just about every single one of the Latinate languages too if you play word games enough:

“What (is the) country (that) are you from?”
“Sri Lanka (is the country that I am from.)”

The reason you don’t think of it this way is because in commonspeak all the parts in the parentheses are implied. In Mandarin it’s the same thing. The response is more commonly “Mei guo,” because “I am” and “person” are implied.

Why are “progressive” Asians so against arguing eugenics? Because it’s racist? To immigrate to the United States, our parents needed to be highly educated. The percentage of intelligent people among educated persons is higher than that of non-educated persons.

By: j

Sun, 06 May 2007 05:59:52 +0000

I think one factor is the acceleration of the subject. I grew up in Korea and went to school there until first grade and by second grade you are expected to memorize the multiplication table and in America that wasn’t covered until the fourth grade.

By: Jesse!

Jesse! — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:48:11 +0000

Since when did “maths” become a word?

I studied some Mandarin and the one thing I noticed right away was how the grammar is almost algebraic. Especially when constructing a question. In China I often got this:

Ni shi neiguo ren?
You are what-country person?

My response is:

Wo shi meiguo ren.
I am American(country) person.

So a Chinese constructs a sentence like an algebra problem, replacing the unknown information with a variable, in this case a question word (what, who, when, where, etc.) So in maths it would look like:

you are X-country person.

then I merely solve for X (X = USA).

If I was raised that way, I’d be a helluva lot better at maths than I was in high school. I remember it took me forever to even understand what a variable was. ‘Course I also had lousy teachers.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 03:55:03 +0000

Once, at a job interview in NYC, the interviewer said to me, “You’re Chinese, right? This job requires a lot of math, so you’ll be a good fit.”

By: Akrypti

Akrypti — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:02:19 +0000

I contend the biggest factor is expectations. At those young ages, we all still feel the need to live up to expectation and the standard of math proficiency set in East Asia is substantially higher than the standard of math proficiency set here in the U.S. Raise those standards (along with providing the schools with ample financing and resources) and the U.S., too, will see measurable improvement in their children’s math and sciences education.

By: David Chen

David Chen — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:30:51 +0000

Hey joz,

First of all, thanks so much for posting a link to my blog entry and for your great comments.

Second of all, I can’t tell you how psyched I am to find this blog! My secret hope after hitting the front page of Digg was that I’d get the chance to be exposed to other websites and blogs that share similar interest to mine, and/or that write about the Asian-American experience in an intimate and articulate fashion. I have subscribed to your RSS feed

Thirdly, in response to what you’ve said, I agree with you almost 100%. I think it’s a nurture thing, with dramatic cultural differences contributing to the bulk of the disparate scores we see. And as for feeling

As a side note, I made a promise to myself and I didn’t read any of the Digg comments because I knew that most of them would be racist filth. However, the comments on my blog itself are quite good, many of them insightful preventing a unique point of view. However, you should read some of the comments on my blog that I DIDN’T publish (I moderate). Several people argued that Asians are just biologically superior, which makes them smarter. Differences in skull size prove this fact! There are a lot of whackos out there.

Thanks again. Keep up the good work!

-Dave

P.S. At some point in the future, I might be interested in contributing to your blog, if you’d be interested as well. Feel free to contact me via e-mail if you’d like to talk further about it.