there's high density of post-Soviet block people in TopCoder ranking - out of TOP10 7 are from Russia, Belarus and Poland. Other 3 - China, Japan, South Africa http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank
there's high density of post-Soviet block people in TopCoder ranking - out of TOP10 7 are from Russia, Belarus and Poland.
Primary and secondary mathematics education has been strong in Russia before, during, and after the Soviet period. Some of the neighboring countries that were part of either the Russian empire or the Soviet Union (also China since the P.R.C. regime began) share some of the same cultural influences on educational practice.
Another Hacker News participant told us all about a very interesting discussion of mathematics education in Russia
In my experience (coming from former communist country, now living in US) it's a bit amplified by the fact that these competitions are significantly more popular in those countries than they are for example in US or Western Europe. It just means more in practical terms like getting a good job. I happen to work for the ACM ICPC and if you look at participation (number of contestants) from Western Europe it's much less than countries like China, India or Russia. From what I heard, scoring in such a competition in these countries is really prestigious. Not that it doesn't matter in US or Western Europe, but it's not that important.
Some of the high schools in Poland had classes* that were specialising in preparing students for algorithms competitions. Back when I was in this age, we had additional weekend tutorials focused solely on solving topcoder kind of challenges. A lot of guys that did well went to the Warsaw University afterwards and kept on scoring more contests.
*Structure of educational system might be a bit different there, so by class I mean a profiled group of people stuck together for 3 years of high school.
