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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The person I know who attended Cambridge for maths was a USAJMO qualifier in HS, and had a several top 10 and recognition awards in less-popular but still prestigious national-level pure and applied, individual and and team, exam and project, math contest 
 award, and a research internship in HS.

That's about top 100 to 200 in USA in-grade-level performing HS math student. [/quote]

It may be true that there are a good number of high performing math olympiad kids studying math at prestigious university math programs. However, competition math and the math you study in college are quite different. Competition math is not everyone's cup of tea and you don't need to have invested in becoming a math competition champ to be good at the kind of math one does in college or graduate school or as a career mathematician. [/quote]

"Competition math" (aka  advanced, more abstract, deeper math) is the closest thing to college/grad/mathematician work than anything else done in high school. [/quote]

I am the PP you responded to here and have not posted since then. One of my majors was in math and yes I did math contests before college. I never knocked math competitions as shallow. But I also had friends more gifted than me who went into the field, are very successful, and who had never entered a math competition in their lives. I probably could have beat them at high school math competition questions because I had more familiarity from practice and better speed. Sure, math competitions are a great way to get young people into math, and my own kid has done them. But I hope we can agree it’s stupid to measure math potential only by this method. This is like saying you’re only a good musician if you have won music competitions. People do have ears and other ways to recognize talent.[/quote]

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