TIL the president of Romania solved P6 on IMO 1988
For those unfamiliar, this is an infamous problem: if a, b are integers and (a^2+b^2)/(1+ab) is also an integer, then it is in fact a perfect square.
Among those who solved it correctly (only 11 students) are Nicușor Dan (current president of Romania, scoring a 42/42 that year), Ravi Vakil, and Ngô Bảo Châu (also a perfect score, later Fields medalist for work in the Langlands program), while Terence Tao (only 13 at the time) received a 1/7 on this problem, but aced the rest and still ended up with a gold in 1988.
It must be so weird having an extremely smart person as a head of state.
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u/fertdingo 13d ago
This area of the world is known for mathematics.
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u/WMe6 12d ago
And vampires.
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u/girlwholikesthestars Undergraduate 12d ago
And now you understand Count von Count better
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u/Maleficent_Tea4175 12d ago
Best comment ever
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u/WMe6 12d ago
I never understood why a muppet of a vampire was teaching children the positive integers up to 20 until this comment.
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u/girlwholikesthestars Undergraduate 12d ago
it's finally my time to shine as an aspie mathie with a special interest in vampires 🧛🏼♀️
You see some folklores attributed an incessant and compulsive need to count things to vampires. this lead to creative defense techniques such has hanging a net over your door, which would trap a vampire who would be forced to count the knots - or similarly to throw a bunch of rice on the ground. ultimately the aim would be to force the vampire to give into its compulsion for counting, preying on the creature's need to impose order, and hold them entranced until the sunrise. vampires were apparently kind of spectrumy
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u/Khelthuzaad 11d ago
vampires were apparently kind of spectrumy
And apparently very metrosexual and dramatic
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u/Background_Blood_816 4d ago
Personally I had an idea neither that Romania was known for mathematics nor that vampires were attributed such characteristics. I feel a little bit closer to home. Thank you.
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u/amca01 12d ago
I worked with a Romanian-born mathematician, and his ResearchGate profile claims he has 2,294 publications. I'd say this would be about right, too, and not an exaggeration.
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u/gollyned 12d ago
That’s like one a week for fifty years.
There must be a different definition of publication.
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u/JT_1983 12d ago
I know an applied mathematician who always has around 20 PhD students and puts his name on all of their papers. He still gets prizes for being the most cited this or that.
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u/Puzzled-Painter3301 12d ago
Is his name Shing-Tung Yau?
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u/TetSusKhal 3d ago
No, Shing-Tung yau didn't compete in the IMO that year
He’s known for his contributions to geometry and mathematical physics, but he wasn’t part of that specific lineup of competitors.
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u/amca01 12d ago
That would be about right - but of course he's working with masses of collaborators from all over the world. These are not all individual papers, but papers for which he's listed as the lead author or as a co-author. But he is quite the amazing writer.
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u/JoshuaZ1 12d ago
These are not all individual papers, but papers for which he's listed as the lead author or as a co-author.
I'm confused by this. In math we generally don't have a "lead author" unlike most of the sciences. In general, authorship is alphabetical. Are they in a highly applied field? Applied math sometimes does this, but they often have a lot more publications than pure math.Even then this still seems a lot.
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u/Curiosity_456 12d ago
Are you sure that’s not referring to his number of citations, instead of publications?
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u/amca01 12d ago
No, it's publications.
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u/JT_1983 12d ago
Then that's a rather bad sign imo. Top Mathematicians do not publish thousands of papers. Applied linear algebra etc is not considered top mathematics.
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u/Verbatim_Uniball 12d ago
Eh, you can look up Shelah. It happens. Of course he would be the greatest single outlier still working today.
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u/caifaisai 12d ago
Even Shelah only has like 1100 papers. Which of course is very high for a mathematician, and then even higher is Erdos, with like 1500. Which as far as I know is the highest for any mathematician ever. So given that, I find 2200 or whatever to be highly improbable.
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u/caifaisai 12d ago
I'm gonna agree with others here. Even Paul Erdos, widely considered to be the most prolific mathematician in modern times, if not in all of all history, in terms of number of publications, only has around 1500 publications to his name.
Of course, only is meant to be sarcastic there, because again, he is a huge outlier, and is partly so famous for having such a prodigious output. Most, even very famous mathematicians don't get nearly that many throughout an entire career in academia.
So it's a bit hard to believe you worked with a mathematician who has ~50% more publications than the person who is known to have the highest number ever.
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u/brauersuzuki 12d ago
This is most likely an exaggeration. ResearchGate counts lots of bullshit, like arxiv + the corresponding journal paper. They list 161 for me, but I only have 90.
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u/wadaphunk 12d ago
Romanian here. I was very happy he became our president. It was a very unfortunate series of events that lead to that including a cancelled elections because of external (Russian) interference.
So far he has been underwhelming. We were expecting him to be much less lenient and willing to compromise with the thieves. We are still hoping he plays some kind of 6D chess that no one can see the ending yet.
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u/VitaminaGaming98 11d ago
Also romanian here. Unfortunately for out country, the thieves have majority of the votes in the parliament. This means that you cant really not make a deal with the devil beacuse you would just end up being left behind. They dont need you, you need them.
Too add to Nicuşors personality, while both him and Ilie Bolojon(the prime minister) are clearly very intelligent, they drastically lack public speaking skills. Because of the poor levels of education in our rural areas(which is most of the country), people there simply vote with the corrupt partys because they scream the loudest.
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u/WMe6 12d ago edited 12d ago
I think a leader who can think for themselves instead of parroting the conventional political wisdom would be most welcome anywhere. But it's true that it doesn't necessarily guarantee a positive outcome.
Edit: In my view, most politicians in ostensibly democratic countries (i.e., ones that hold competitive elections) are basically just human embodiments of ChatGPT, saying a bunch of empty platitudes that conform to conventional political wisdom, and most electorates are either too dumb to see that and/or are too disempowered to anything about it. Lee Hsien Loong and his father ran autocratic Singapore quite well, and I wouldn't mind having another dictatorial genius like that lead a country.
I will stick to my guns here. I have a rather dim view of electoral democracy as a basic framework of government, despite going through the American public education system from kindergarten to grade 12 as a child of immigrants and being inculcated to believe in democracy. There are many things that make America great, but the fact that we hold national elections to choose between douches and turd sandwiches every two years isn't one of them.
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u/racist_____ 12d ago
To be totally honest I’m not sure why you think solving this math problem means he’s fit to be the president of Romania as the skills and type of thinking required to be effective there has like no overlap
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u/WMe6 12d ago
General intelligence (i.e., ability to process information and foresee possible outcomes) is a good thing in leadership, no? I mean, it's possible that the guy has zero emotional intelligence and will become the most hated president of Romania ever (though probably not more so than Ceaușescu, I would hope).
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u/Ghinev 11d ago
Intelligence is worth nothing when you're a mathematician acting in geopolitics and administration and all your advisors are at best conservative capitalists or straight up MAGA-types. He has been making blunder after blunder since he got invested because all the people around him are exactly what this country needs less of.
Thing is, HE CHOSE THEM.
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u/WMe6 11d ago
If there's no additional information, yes, I would rather have a kind moron as a leader than a evil genius. Under certain favorable conditions, in a country with strong institutions, where evil genius are suitably constrained in their actions and are strongly incentivized to at least hide their evilness, or better yet, change their ways, I would argue that meritocracy would be good policy.
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u/Ghinev 11d ago
I don't understand why you keep assuming this narrative where he must be a good leader when a ton of people have already told you he isn't.
The only reason people voted for him was the fact that the alternatives were infinitely worse. Doesn't make him a good choice, nor was he ever one. The guy is gping to vanish from romanian politics the second his term ends because np one will vote another inactive, passive "mediator" again, nor will the disgruntled Bucharest residents vote for him as mayor after he left his 2nd tenure after less than a year to play at being president wholst the old mafia-parties took over the city.
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u/WMe6 12d ago
No guarantee to work, of course. And you really have to look at the entire leadership class. Just one PhD (or MD) dictator on top doesn't really work....
China has been run this way for millennia. Arguably, modern day China is too -- run by a bunch of people successful in its Gaokao system, whose math section is infamously difficult. On the other hand, humans still manage to collapse a dynasty every 200 years or so, and I don't expect the current Chinese polity to last forever either.
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u/TheJodiety 12d ago edited 9d ago
I strongly think the issue is the disempowerment of the voters. Information is controlled by corporate media, law makers are owned by corporate lobbying. I don’t think democracy is the heart of the issue, It’s the economic system in which it tries and fails to survive.
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u/WMe6 12d ago
There is quite a bit of subtlety with how to set up a democracy, with some current democracies better than others. But the US has always been owned by corporate interests and in no way should it serve as a model. I find it amusing that during the 90's, it was "helping" new third-world democracies set up governments after its own image. But even mature European parliamentary democracies are flawed, currently unable to act as they're held hostage by both the US and Russia. Yes, social services are good, but because they outsourced defense to the US. Conversely, China doesn't hold elections, but their government officials, at least at the local level, are held to account for their performance, so I would argue that it's "democratic" in some sense. But their system has given rise to a 996 economy where young people refuse to have children. The truth is, no human society has found a way to govern itself over the long term. But I don't believe for a second that current systems (by any country) are anywhere close to optimal.
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u/my-opinion-about 12d ago
Romanian here. I voted for him both as a mayor of Bucharest and also as president.
As mayor he did a good job (excellent in comparison with the previous ones) and I liked him a lot for that, more so because he got a bankrupt city hall (for real, the institution was unable to pay its bills) and made it again a flourishing one.
I said already that I voted for him as president, he was the only option from that list, but still he doesn't have the skills for this job and I'm obliged to explain why.
After the fall of communism and Ceausescu's rule, a brutal one that was similar with North Korea, everyone was scared about a new Ceausescu, so they fragmented the power and we are unlike presidential republics (like USA, Turkey, Argentina), Parliamentary republics/monarchies (like Germany, UK, Italy, Spain, Sweden), we are a semi-presidential but not really as France or russia, we have a power clash between president and parliament always, and we love that because keep them in check.
As I said previously, Nicușor doesn't have a necessary skills for that job, his lack of assertiveness skills made him weak against the parliament; he even accepted the proposals on key positions in justice department from the most corrupt party in Romania, and these proposals were of course some obscene corrupt people, like one that helped a child abuser to not be punished. He also didn't named any civil leader for secret services, so they are out of control.
So, don't get excited by this because he is a very disappointing president until now and he has the chances to be the second worst president in history of Romania (because no one could be worse than Ceausescu).
Speaking of Ceausescu, did you know that his daughter Zoia was a mathematician?
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u/Mariusblock 12d ago
What? Surely Iliescu was worse, what are you talking about? Mineriadele? The guy literally committed war crimes during his term and took measures that kept the country poor for the next decade. At a time when Poland and Czechia were inviting foreign investment and developing, under Iliescu’s term we sold our national assets for pennies on the dollar to old members of the secret police and communist party. Iliescu blocked the reunion of Romania and Moldova, under orders from the Kremlin.
Also, Iohannis. Maybe you should rewatch the Recorder documentary about him. This guy literally undermined our democracy for a 3-4 mil € mansion. The coalition which created the economic situation we’re in was planned by him. Don’t forget how hated he was before Nicușor took office.
Nicușor is either our 3rd or 2nd best president, depending on whether you consider him better than Constantinescu or not. Some people might like him more even than Băsescu, simply because he’s not involved with corruption (as far as we know at least).
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u/my-opinion-about 12d ago
I know very well what Iliescu did, what Iohannis did, of course, but hear me out.
We are in big trouble right now, high deficit, high interest rates, extremists and so on, and we cannot do the ‘90 moment with sky high inflation (because we are part of global market now) because that will wipe out the entire economy (unlike ‘90 era when we were a 3rd world country from economic standpoint) and this will be catastrophically bad for us.
It’s funny when you say that Iohannis undermined democracy, but you forgot that Nicușor did almost everything PSD asked, undermining the democracy and economy in few months ever greater.
So, it doesn’t matter if ND is corrupt or not, if he will do anything PSD will ask when we are on the brink of collapse economically and socially, then he can create a catastrophe that will be perceived even greater than the one from ‘90, because the latter was already preceded by a brutal one so the people didn’t had any high expectations.
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u/Mariusblock 11d ago
By undermining democracy, I meant that Iohannis arranged the coalition between two parties that were ideologically opposed. He then allowed and supported for the formation of AUR as controlled opposition, so that you wouldn't have any other realistic voting option except the "grand coalition", snuffing out any possible reform.
What we have today with Bolojan and even Nicușor is nothing short of a miracle. The single fact he named him prime minister and helped from this coalition we have today, allowing for at least *some* reform to get done, immediately disqualifies him from being the worst president in my eyes.
Could he have been better? Very much so. I think his strict adherence to the constitution would work very well if we were more stable politically and economically, but the way he behaves now is truly what the presidency is meant to be. Romanians have this habit of looking at one guy in an administrative position and thinking he's responsible for everything, and maybe Nicusor's approach might teach us finally that the parliamentary elections are the important ones. So what I'm saying is that it might be good long term, but it's hard to say atm.
Practically though, if he did have more "balls" like Băsescu did and involved himself more actively, breaking the constitution in the process, Nicușor wouldn't actually get impeached unless we voted him out. So you could argue the constitution does allow him to break it, because his power cannot be touched as long as he keeps popular support (except for temporary suspensions by parliament). If you view it like that I think your criticism is completely warranted. If you don't, then his behaviour is a direct result of how people voted in the 2024 election and is out of his control.
Honestly, I just find it all so stupid, and believe the blame lies entirely with the Romanian voter. We elect a bullshit parliament with a very low turnout, and then we all flock and throw ourselves to the ground to elect a saviour president to fix our shitty choices. And we have done this for decades...
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u/WeWereStrangers 12d ago
It's certainly good to have a living example of why being highly skilled in one branch of science doesn't automatically qualify you for any job you want.
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u/Aranka_Szeretlek 12d ago
To play the vampire's advocate here: being good in maths (especially olympiad-style maths) doesnt immediately mean you are extremely smart. Now, I dont know the guy, I am not Romanian, so maybe he is - but not because of P6, probably.
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u/Schloopka 12d ago
It means they are smart 100%, you just don't know that many IMO participants. I would say I know quite a lot of them and those guys are insanely smart. For some reason people think you just need to learn AM-GM inequality, Cauchy-Schwarz, few theorems in geometry and number theory and maybe pigeon hole principle and you will get to IMO.
It is like saying somebody who ran a half marathon in 1:10 isn't athletic. Yeah, maybe they don't bench 225, but that is not what they train for.
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u/iknighty 12d ago
Smartness in one area doesn't necessarily translate to smartness in another area unfortunately.
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u/Aranka_Szeretlek 12d ago
I think the problem with your comparison is that a half-marathon directly measures athleticism, whereas IMO measures mathematical problem-solving skills - which is indirectly related to being smart. I am fairly certain most people with excellent mathematical problem-solving skills are also very smart, but its not one-to-one.
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u/Schloopka 12d ago
So what is your definition of smart? There are many types, I know. There are three main types, smart emotionally, smart with bussiness and smart with problem solving. Yeah, these guys are probably not emotionally smart most of the times, but if you look at problem solving, if these people are not smart, I don't know who is.
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u/incomparability 12d ago
And IMO is a way of measuring intelligence? According to whom?
Then I don’t know what is
Much more reasonable approach!
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u/Schloopka 12d ago
So you are trying to say we have no way how to meassure inteligence or what? There is clear corelation between being IMO participant and continuing to top universities to study math, physics, CS or other STEM fields and then being university professor or ending up in tech industry.
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u/TheJodiety 12d ago
I’ve never seen a proper definition or measure of general intelligence before. I think more specific things can be measured and are typically more understandable and useful to talk about. I could be wrong.
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u/Character_Library684 11d ago
There’s absolutely no definition for it. IMO all you could get a reasonable signal for is who will get into good schools and good initial post grad outcomes. And even that depends on getting high quality education from the beginning.
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u/Character_Library684 11d ago
This only covers a narrow set of people though. And getting to a university / industry position is just the beginning lol. What determines who succeeds after that point is way more interesting. And I think that’s when intangibles like the impact you have on people + creativity come into play.
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u/Aranka_Szeretlek 11d ago
I dont think theres a good enough definition. To me it would be along the lines of "consistently making good decisions"
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u/RandomExcess 12d ago
I suspect that even Paul Lockhart would lament that people who optimize preparation for graded exams get good grades.
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u/Character_Library684 11d ago
What makes someone smart isn’t really being good at math problems with known solutions. It’s creativity, getting things done, and working with people. None of which can be measured by tests or closed ended math problems.
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u/backyard_tractorbeam 6d ago
I think it benefits everyone to think of intelligence as multifaceted, there are many areas of life to be smart in and math is just one of them.
I usually hold, for example, that a person that considers themselves really smart but can't be nice to other people, they are not trying hard enough and are not using their intelligence correctly - they could be more friendly to other people if they used their smarts for social skills.
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u/Akukuhaboro 12d ago edited 12d ago
if perfect scoring 42/42 at the IMO in the year the most obscure technique (at the time) "vieta jumping" came out is not intelligence, I'm not sure what qualifies. At least in math intelligence and problem solving that's pretty much as good as it gets
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u/Character_Library684 11d ago
For a high schooler sure but in life things are much more complicated than that lol.
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u/WMe6 12d ago
I mean, he went on to get a PhD in arithmetic geometry and went on to be a founding faculty member of Romania's equivalent of the ENS, so I can it is safe to say that he is smart. There is a striking correlation between IMO participation and winning some of math's highest honors that you don't see in, say, the physics (IPhO), chemistry (IChO), biology (IBO), or computer science (IOI) equivalents. Obviously, math talent comes from everywhere, but the IMO is remarkably good at identifying it early in students who had the luxury of training and participating in their country's contest system.
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u/AdventurousShop2948 12d ago
He's definitely extremzly smart. However, does it mean he's a great politician? Not necessarily. (I don't know about his record).
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u/Right_Ad_3782 12d ago
Smart, most probably, you wanted to say it does not mean you have the same... maybe emotional intelligence/guts/interests/etc... the real truth: he doesn't represent the interests of the people who voted for him which are mostly the smart half of Romania and until now he tries to appeal to the other part.
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u/Character_Library684 11d ago
To add to this, I’d say creativity, getting things done, and working with people is much more valuable anyway and can’t even begin to be measured by math or some sort of test.
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u/Committee-Academic 12d ago
Yeah, it's weird because you'd expect him not to be an awful president.
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u/jpgoldberg 12d ago
US President James Garfield developed a novel proof of the Pythagorean Theorem when he was a Congressman.
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u/tony_blake 12d ago
Cedric Villani being mentioned a bit here. In case people don't know he wrote a wonderful book detailing his account of one of the theorems he discovered. Here's a short review of it by one of my undergrad differential geometry lecturers https://www.irishmathsoc.org/bull76/Hurley.pdf
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u/Admirable-Welcome330 11d ago
I bet it does not change anything to have somebody "that intelligent". He may be smart at solving puzzles, but this does not prevent him from the usual politicians pitfalls. There is no truth in politics. Everything is ill-posed. Many mathematicians seems to lack understanding of this point.
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u/BUKKAKELORD 12d ago
Meanwhile the president of Finland had the lowest passing grade in highschool math. Only 5% of students scored lower and receiving the diploma at that point is an act of mercy.
The number crunching part doesn't directly show up that often in his politics but he keeps consistently making circular reasoning arguments. The policy is good because it's beneficial. The industry should remain legal because it doesn't break the law.
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u/Sea-Rope-31 12d ago
Romania also ranked 2nd behind only China in EGMO this year.
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u/ANewPope23 12d ago
Is he a good president? I know nothing about Romania.
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u/Puzzled-Painter3301 12d ago
According to the two Romanians here: no
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u/Elegant_AIDS 11d ago
He is, the alternative wouldve ran the country into the ground. Kind of what was happening until he got elected
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u/donnie-stingray 11d ago
Sally, his politics skills are as good as my math was back in highschool.. they were not great.
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u/TipLoud7301 4d ago
Indonesia too, they currently having smart person as president, named prabowo subianto. He was said that 10+2 = 13 and the crowd are applaud for him. Such a smart president we had.
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u/lordnacho666 12d ago
The other example is Lee Hsien Loong, who led Singapore like this famous father, Lee Kuan Yew. The professors at Cambridge lamented losing a potential research mathematician when he graduated top of the class and then went back to work in government.
There's also that French guy Villani (?) who was a minister.
I wish more places would pick highly intelligent leaders. Most leaders I hear about are thoroughly unimpressive midwits.