Other people's praise, I don't know him
Some time ago, I wrote in our mathematical corner about the success of a young man, a graduate student of the Garwolin High School, who, for his work on rather elementary properties of a triangle and a circle inscribed in it, received a silver medal in the Polish Qualification Competition for Young Scientists of the European Union, and also took second place in national competition of final examinations of students. The first of these awards allowed him to enter any university in Poland, the second is a fairly large financial injection. I have no reason to keep his name secret: Philip Rekek. Today is the next episode of the series “You praise others, you don’t know your own”.
The article has two themes. They are quite tightly connected.
Poles on the wave
In March 2019, the media admired the great success of the Poles - they took two first places in the World Ski Jumping Championships (Daniel Kubacki and Kamil Stoch, in addition to this, Piotr Zyla and Stefan Hula also jumped). In addition, there was the success of the team. I appreciate sports. It takes talent, hard work and dedication to reach the top. Even in ski jumping, which is seriously practiced in a number of countries of the world, the number of athletes who have scored points at the World Cup stages does not reach a hundred. Oh, the jumper who dropped out of the national team was Maciej Kot. I personally know who taught him (at the Oswald Balzer High School in Zakopane). She said that Maciej was a very good student and always made up for the gap caused by training and competition. Happy birthday, Mr. Maciej!
On April 4, 2019, the final team programming competition took place in Porto. Of course, I'm talking about Fr. The competition is aimed at students. 57 3232 people took part in the qualifying rounds. students from 110 universities from 135 countries on all continents. XNUMX teams (three people each) reached the final.
The final competition lasts five hours and may be extended at the discretion of the jury. Teams receive tasks and must solve them. This is clear. They work as a team as they want. The number of tasks solved and the time are important. After solving each problem, the team sends it to the jury, which evaluates its correctness. When the decision is not good, it can be improved, but with the equivalent of a penalty loop in cross-country skiing: 20 minutes are added to the team's time.
First, let me mention the places that some famous universities have taken. Cambridge and Oxford - ex aequo 13 and ex aequo 41st ETH Zurich (the best technological university in Switzerland), Princeton, University of British Columbia (one of the top three universities in Canada) and École normale superieure (French school, from which a radical reform of the teaching of mathematics, when mathematical geniuses are considered groups).
How did the Polish teams perform?
You probably expect, dear readers, that the best were somewhere in the region of 110 places, even if they reached the final (I remind you that more than three thousand universities competed in the qualifying rounds, and where can we go to the USA and Japan)? That our representatives were like hockey players who are said to be able to beat Cameroon in extra time? How do we, in a poor and oppressed country from within, have higher opportunities? We are lagging behind, everyone wants to take advantage of us ...
Well, a little better than 110th place. fifties? Even higher. Impossible - higher than Zurich, Vancouver, Paris and Princeton???
Well, I'm not going to hide and beat around the bush. Professional complainers about what is Polish will be shocked. The team from Warsaw University won the gold medal, and the Wroclaw University team won the silver medal. Dot.
However, I admit at once not so much in the draw, but in a certain inflection. True, we won these two medals (we? - I adhere to success), but ... there were four gold and two silver medals. First place went to Moscow University, second to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the most famous technical university in the world), third to Tokyo, fourth to Warsaw (but I emphasize: with a gold medal), fifth to Taiwan, sixth to Wroclaw (but with a silver medal). ).
Patron of the Polish team, Prof. Jan Madej, he perceived the results with a certain ambivalence. For 25 years now, he has been announcing that he will retire when our teams do not come up with a decent result. So far, he has failed. Let's see next year. As readers may guess, I'm joking a bit. In any case, in 2018 it was “very bad”: the Polish teams were in the first place without medals. This year, 2019, “a little better”: gold and silver medals. Let me remind you: there are more than 3 of them besides us. . We have never been on our knees.
Poland stood very high from the very beginning, even when the word "computer science" did not yet exist. This was the case until the 70s. You just managed to feel the coming trend. In Poland, a successful version of one of the first programming languages was created - Algol60 (the number is the year of foundation), and then, thanks to the energy of Jan Madej, the Polish students were well prepared. He took over from Madeia Krzysztof Dix and it is also thanks to him that our students are so successful. Anyway, more names should be mentioned here.
Soon after the restoration of independence in 1918, Polish mathematicians managed to create their own school, leading in Europe throughout the entire interwar period, and a decent level of Polish mathematics has been maintained to this day. I don’t remember who wrote that “in science, once a wave has arisen, it lasts for decades”, but this corresponds to the current state of Polish informatics. The numbers don't lie: our students have been at the forefront for at least 25 years.
Maybe some details.
Tasks for the best
I will present one of the tasks from these finals, one of the simplest. Our players won them. It was necessary to figure out where to put road signs "dead end". The input was two columns of numbers. The first two numbers were the number of streets and the number of intersections, followed by a list of connections via two-way streets. We can see this in the picture below. The program had to work even on a million data and no longer than five seconds. It took the representative office of Warsaw University to write the program… 14 minutes!
Here is another task - I will give it briefly and partially. Lanterns are lit on the main street of City X. At each intersection, the light is red for a few seconds, then green for a few seconds, then red again for a few seconds, then green again, etc. The cycle may be different at each intersection. The car is going to the city. Travels at a constant speed. What is the probability that it will pass without stopping? If he stops, then in what light?
I encourage readers to review the assignments and read the final report on the website (https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results), and in particular to see the names of the three students from Warsaw and the three students from Wroclaw who did well in the World Cup. Once again I assure you that I belong to the fans of Kamil Stoch, the handball team and even Anita Wlodarczyk (remember: the world record holder in throwing heavy objects). I don't care about football. For me, the greatest athlete named Lewandowski is Zbigniew. The first Polish athlete to jump 2 m higher, breaking Plavczyk's pre-war record of 1,96 m. Apparently there is another outstanding athlete named Lewandowski, but I don’t know in what discipline…
The disgruntled and envious will say that these students will soon be caught by either foreign universities or corporations (say McDonald's or McGyver Bank) and tempted by an American career or big money because they will win every rat race. However, we do not value the common sense of youth. Few venture into such a career. The path of science usually does not bring in big money, but there are unique procedures for the outstanding. But I don't want to write about it in a mathematical corner.
About the teacher's soul
Second thread.
Our magazine is monthly. The moment you read these words, something will happen to the teachers' strike. I will not campaign. Even the worst enemies admit that they, the teachers, make the biggest contribution to the national GDP.
We are still living through the anniversary of the restoration of independence, that miracle and logical contradiction in which all three powers that have occupied Poland since 1795 have lost.
You praise others, you don't know your own... The pioneer of psychological didactics was (long before the Swiss Jean Piaget, who worked, in particular, in the 50s, who was observed by the elite of Krakow teachers in the 1960s-1980s) Jan Vladislav David (1859-1914). Like many intellectuals and activists of the early 1912th century, he understood that the time had come to train young people to work for the future Poland, the one in whose revival no one had any doubts. Only with a slight exaggeration can he be called Piłsudski of Polish education. In his dissertation, which had the character of a manifesto, “On the Soul of Teachers” (XNUMX), he wrote in a style characteristic of those times:
We will smile in response to this lofty and sublime style of expression. But remember that these words were written in a completely different era. The times before World War I and the times after World War II are separated by a cultural divide.1. And it was in 1936 that Stanislav Lempitsky, having fallen into a "bearish mood" himself,2he referred3 to the text of David with a slight digression:
Exercise 1. Think about the quoted words of Jan Wladislaw David. Adapt them to today, soften the exaltation. If you feel that this is impossible to do, you probably think that the teacher's role is only to give the students a set of instructions. If yes, then maybe one day you will be replaced (replaced) by a computer (electronic education)?
Exercise 2. Keep in mind that the teaching profession is on a narrowing list profession seriously. More and more professions, even well-paid ones, rely on the satisfaction of precisely this need. Someone (?) imposes on us the need to drink Coca-Cola, beer, chew gum (including for the eyes: television), buy more and more expensive soaps, cars, chips (those made from potatoes and electronic), and miraculous means to get rid of the obesity caused by these chips (both from potatoes and from electronic ones). We are more and more ruled by artificiality, perhaps, as humanity, we must endlessly get involved in this artificiality. But you can live without Coca-Cola - you can't live without teachers.
This huge advantage of the teaching profession is also its disadvantage, because everyone is too used to the fact that teachers are like air: we do not see every day that - in a figurative sense - we owe our existence to them.
I would like to take this opportunity to express special gratitude to your teachers, Reader, who taught you to read, write and count so well that ... you can do it so far - as evidenced by the fact that you read the words printed here with understanding. I also thank my teachers...for the same. That I can read and write, that I understand words. Julian Tuwim's poem "My Daughter in Zakopane" may be ideologically wrong in general, but not entirely:
1) There is an opinion that the pace of cultural change is very well measured by the derivative (in the mathematical sense of the word) of changes in the fashion for women's clothing. Let's take a look at this for a moment: we know from old photographs how the ladies of the early 30th century were dressed and how they were dressed in the XNUMXs.
2) This is supposed to be an allusion to scenes from Stanisław Bareja's film The Teddy Bear (1980), where the phrase "a new tradition was born" is correctly mocked.
3) Stanisław Lempicki, Polish Educational Traditions, publ. Our bookstore, 1936.
