I went to a boarding highschool for those who excelled at math and science. One of my friends was doing his calc homework and couldn’t figure it out. He said the equation out loud to himself to think and his roommate he just met a week before blurted out the solution. Turns out he was one of the genius kids in school – and my friend would routinely say these complicated questions out loud and his roommate would always just say the answer immediately. I’ve always been jealous of that ability
No good at math, but make up for it in Excel.
edit: And with estimation, as previously described.
My Mom was told stuff like that, but I’m not sure how prevalent that view is nowadays. Maybe among less educated people. I don’t know. There were always a reasonable number of girls in my high school and college math classes, but the more advanced stuff got the fewer cute white girls there would be.
Good if it doesn’t happen these days too often. But I’ve seen examples myself. I just hope it’s not widespread.
I’m pretty good at doing it in my head. In Nigeria, we used to have to recite the multiplication tables from 1 all the way up to 20. That might have something to do with it.
Why was six afraid of seven?
I heard once (and I can’t verify the accuracy) that virtually all of the perfect math SAT scores are from men.
And I do know this–men and women have the same mean IQ, but men have more dispersion. That is, they are more likely to be extrememly smart or extremely stupid, while women tend to cluster around the average.
That’s why you have more male math PhD’s, astrophycists, etc. It’s also why you have more men in prison for violent crime.
because seven ate nine.
You sound like the next Larry Summers! 
Because seven is a registered six offender.
Yep, same.
That’s pretty much exactly what Summers said. Maybe he is Larry Summers.
Exactly.
Greenman may be the next Fed Chairman!
If I knew then what I know now, I would evaluate girls on the basis of potential attractiveness + intelligence. Those are the ones who seem to have become real winners. Like 8.5+'s going to Harvard Med, etc.
The type of girl who is too smart to stay unattractive (or put little effort into being attractive) once they get into the real world.
Assume that the IQ distributions of men and women are independent and identically distributed, with the same mean and different variances. If you pick a man and woman at random, which one is more likely to have higer IQ if a) distributions are normal, b) more realistically, if the distributions are defined for positive numbers only (zero probability of negative IQs)?
a) Equal probability. And don’t rule out negative intelligence so fast! There are people who lower the collective IQ of the society by cornering attention away from intelligent pursuits. Kim Kardashian.
b) Normal distribution but positive only? So 0 would be the most common IQ? I don’t follow. But if so, then a man would be more intelligent because the average IQ (integral of xp(x)dx) would be higher due to larger dispersion.
a) yes, and a good point about Kimmy
b) I meant a better choice for a distribution than normal - for instance lognormal, exponential, whatever you like which is defined for positive numbers only
If some one tells me they are good in math i assume a score of atleast 30 on Putnam
I was accustomed to math from early years and my dad managed to create passion for math in me. So I always liked math and it has always been my strongest subject both at school and at uni.
The good thing is that I don’t remember most the stuff, but it trained the brain and made it more analytical. It may seem a waste of time now, but it’s definetely not
Ivan, ti hodil v 57 shoklu?