cc wrote:
> "John W." <worthj1970@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> Not sure. The compulsory curriculum of maths in the US high schools
is
> equivalent to that of the French junior high schools, and your
students that
> need it will fill the gap in the first years of uni,while the French
ones
> that won't need differential equations be traumatised by bad marks in
maths
> at highschool.
> So the American youths were probably good at doing what they had
actually
> studied and had not yet been frightened by "serious" maths.
>
> > Yep. My wife and I have discussed this and we figure this iss why
the
> > US consistently produces academic research in such quantity, if not
> > always quality, despite performing poorly on math as a whole.
>
> Isn't it more because most of the academic research is done by people
like
> your wife ?
>
Well, she's really freakin' smart, which is why she's personally so
successful. But while she's always been smart, in Japan she seemed very
unmotivated; I don't think the system encourages it, at least for
really stable types like my wife (who don't see why people should
virtually commit suicide for a job without enjoying it, or withough
enjoying life in general). In Japan she was an OL graduated from a
two-year college working as a legal clerk. Now she's a PhD from
Berkeley researching cancer. Not that there aren't people in the US
that lead misdirected lives, but in Japan she pretty much did exactly
what was expected of women. It wasn't until she came to the US to
finish her undergrad that she learned how good she was at science and
how much potential she had (and how much she liked pushing that
particular boundary).

But it's not just her, actually. A lot of my Japanese friends that do
research in the US like the environment here much more than in Japan.
It'd probably be a good topic for a research paper to figure out why
(actually I think I've read stuff on Japanese in other professions not
wanting to return to Japan).

John W.