11/10/24 - Jiang Ping Edition
[We had a Friendsgiving potluck, and I accidentally managed to cut three of my fingers while trying to make glazed carrots. It is super uncomfortable to type right now, so I want to take maybe a few days off while these cuts heal. But I don’t want to leave you guys with no content either, so I figured I’d write a relatively shorter piece on my takes on some of the latest news coming out of China. I think I should be back to normal by tomorrow.]
I think I saw someone comment a while ago that they were looking forward to followups to the Jiang Ping story, and well, the follow up finally came. For people who didn’t follow the events as they went down, let me do a short little recap.
The Alibaba Math Championships is a yearly non-profit math competition, popular because there is no barrier to entry. Anyone can sign up to join, from uni professors to middle school students. It mostly got its claim to fame because the winner of the very first year is Wei Dongyi, a viral math professor from Beijing University that gets meme’d a lot for looking really unkempt and unassuming and even a little bit dumb, but actually being a math genius (*I assume. I don’t know enough maths to have any concept of how impressive his achievements are.)
The competition is held in two rounds. The first round of the exam is completely open book. You get the questions, and then you get 24 hours in which to answer them, during which time you can research whatever you want, and the questions are from a mix of mathematical areas. If you get 45 points out of 100, you get to move onto the second round. The second round is the finals, where you can choose one of five areas to compete in (probability, geometry, etc, etc), and this one is closed book.
The competition attracted a lot of discussion this year because a girl from a technical school, Jiang Ping, managed to come 12th place in the first round, getting 93 points out of 100. All above and below her, she is surrounded by students from prestigious universities, like Qinghua or Princeton, so she really stood out and people became curious in her right away.
The story is that Jiang Ping’s always had a passion for maths, but her scores in all her other subjects were low enough that she couldn’t get into a proper high school with her low overall score. But she hasn’t given up on maths and is still self-teaching herself with some help from a teacher at the technical school, Wang Runqiu.
At the beginning, this story drew a lot of discussion on whether or not the exam system in China even made sense. Whether someone deserves to get into a good university when the only thing they’re good at is maths. There was a lot of people calling for Zhejiang University, Jiang Ping’s dream school, to make an exception and enrol her.
But soon enough, a lot of voices start cropping up, questioning whether or not this story was even real. There were accusations that she cheated in her exam, because people called up her school and asked and she only got 63/100 in her maths midterms at school. She tried to prove that she wasn’t cheating by doing a livestream where she solved math questions on stream, and a lot of people pointed out that some her notations are written super weird, not something that anyone who’s received any education in maths would do. A lot of people think that her teacher, Wang Runqiu, completed her competition for her (even though he only came 125th place in the same competition).
The discussion died down for a couple of months, because there really wasn’t much else to say except to wait for the results of the final round. And now, the results are out. And Jiang Ping did not win any awards (of which there is 1 gold medalist, 2 silver medalists, 4 bronze medalists, and 10…honourable mentions?). And further investigation revealed that Jiang Ping had been disqualified by Alibaba because Wang Runqiu “provided her help” in the preliminary round, which broke the rule that you’re not supposed to “discuss the exam with others”.
And now it seems everyone has completely turned around and are saying, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I actually believed her!” “How dumb do you have to be to fake being a maths prodigy?” “This was always a scam.” Jiang Ping herself has completely disappeared off of the internet, and I don’t blame her. I can’t even imagine what a mess her PMs must look like right now.
I gotta say, I don’t know nearly enough maths to have anything worthwhile to contribute on this issue. When the controversy was first going down, I saw a lot of respectable maths people give their take on the issue. They watched Jiang Ping’s videos and her past maths work, and I did not see a single person say that she got anything wrong. All people ever seemed to focus on was that her notations were weird, which, like, that makes sense for someone who’s self-studying maths, right? And even then, it seemed like most of the professional maths people were on her side, and it was mostly amateurs that were doubting her.
Personally, I’m still very doubtful about the story that she was never good at maths and was faking the whole thing the entire time. Just from a common sense point of view, if she was a dummy like me, out of the 50,000 some contestants that entered into this competition, even if I had the world’s best maths professor literally reciting to me how I should answer, I probably still couldn’t do a good enough job to come 12th place. Much less if I only had the help of a technical school math teacher. I think either way, she was exceptionally talented at maths,
And even if we accept that she’s an utter fraud, she brute-forced memorised everything and is just Wang Runqiu’s puppet, the societal problem that she represents is still real and undeniable. It’s still true that every year, tons of kids who are exceptionally talented in one thing in particular cannot find their path to success. It’s still true that every year, kids who had great scores can’t go to the schools they want to because they can’t afford it. All of that is still worth discussing whether or not she’s a cheater, and I’m really disappointed that nobody’s interested in these very real issues anymore as soon as they got “proof” that she was fake.
ETA: Latest update on the Biking to Kaifeng situation—the government is shutting down the movement hard, locking down universities, remotely locking bikes as soon as you drive too far from where you picked it up, and even shutting down some streets at night. And the harder they try to ban this fad, the more people are jumping in on it in a very stereotypical teenager rebellion kind of way. The trend is spreading beyond Kaifeng now to all kinds of areas of China, most notably, uni students biking from Tianjin to Tiananmen Square. Even if they face having their bikes remotely locked all of a sudden and being stuck on a dark, rural road at 2AM with no way to get home. I’m still excitedly following where this is going.
Get well soon Moly.