Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017)

At least for up to high school level, it's because they didn't care if a good part of the class fell behind. If little Jimmy (well, little Ivan, I guess) can't understand how algebra works and is getting only 1s and 2s, it's too bad, he'll have to repeat the whole grade again I guess. The whole "maybe math is too hard and we should just make it optional or dumb it down" that I have seen in US was just not something acceptable or plausible as a policy in that system.

At the same time before we go idealizing that system, what Western folks often see are the best of the best examples. Individuals who went to great schools, emigrated and excelled in the West. They may have gone to better schools, with better teachers, or had parents who cared more etc. They don't see a representative sample. Many schools, especially in smaller cities and villages, were not as great, teachers not as caring, cheating was rampant, bribing teachers even more rampant etc.

My sister went to high school in the US for a year some time in the early nineties - we are Norwegian. She got perfect grades and some kind of award for American history. She explained it by saying, US textbooks wanted you to succeed. Whereas she was used to the Norwegian ones which were only out to rank you (on a bell curve - the grading guidelines didn't have set requirement, but instead told teachers to only give 5% the top grade), and if that meant being obtuse and reader-hostile, that was fine. If you were a really dedicated student you'd push through, right? So she thought it was ridiculously easy, but she didn't necessarily learn less.

I can't speak for the US textbooks at that level, but I can confirm that the Norwegian ones were pretty lousy, especially in history. I particularly remember they loved to hide crucial details in margin notes or image texts.

Bulgarian/USSR Math Circles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_circle and problems they work on are in this book https://bookstore.ams.org/mcl-25

Regular school you would solve problems in combinatorics, algebra and geometry together in class by offering small ideas or strategies then trying each one to point out what works and doesn't work. You do enough of these everyday in class then reasoning about abstract sets in analysis isn't a huge leap. Same reason we used to read Euclid in class and make students demonstrate countless proofs.

CMU Discrete Math course has kind of the same techniques where he solves problems with the whole class https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0K540qqyJJU

The best students then joined the school math circle with professional mathematicians and became TAs like in university helping their regular class.

They tried and failed the soviet curriculum with New Math https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

Singapore high school students learn the equivalent of AP Calculus in Grade 10 then either spend years 11/12 at a trade school or stay to earn an associates degree to prep for university covering engineering electives like linear algebra and differential equations.

I had a copy of "Differential and Integral Calculus" by Piskunov that belonged to my father. The prologue said it was used in the curricula of technical schools in the USSR. I used to think about that fact a lot and tried to imagine what those Soviet technical schools would be like. There was a lot of content there that I did not see in any of the seven math courses we had at uni.

From the article:

> There are a lot of good points being made in this thread. I have had a theory that it is in part related to the funding available for lab equipment and computers. During the latter half of the 20th century, in Russia you were very lucky to get access to a “real” computer.

Lets not forget that, selling computers (among other products) to Soviet Union and the whole East block was subject to Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) established in 1949.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...

https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-90-185fs.pdf

"Western export restrictions on civilian computer equipment were lifted in May 1991."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...

The hater comments and mental excuses by American posters are hilarious.

The usa doesn't value its citizens education unless you belong to the top club and pay, europe is better and eastern europe used to be the best since that was all they had.

This is coming from someone who went through the Swiss (probably was amongst the best in western Europe) and eastern European education systems.

The east math was simply much harder, deeper and on a better level. That is all there is. Look, China is valuing the education of their citizens and they are up and coming fast.

I assume because they had not adopted the "dumb everything down to reduce variance in outcomes" educational ideology that has taken hold in most of the west over the past 50 years.

I’ve seen the same explanation used for why static and functional languages took off more in Europe while dynamic and object oriented languages took off more in America: American research labs could afford more expensive computers that could handle more runtime overhead. The shining example of this being Xerox PARC with their Alto computer specifically designed to run Smalltalk like a computer from 10 years in the future.

US STEM education through high school is 2-4 years behind the old USSR. Meaning what was taught to 10-year-olds in the USSR was/is taught to 12-14-year-olds in the US

They're not, it's an illusion.

My older sibling went to HS in Eastern Europe and kept the textbooks, because my family had this same reverence towards math over there. I went to HS in Canada and in grade 12 when I was doing Calculus I had a look at the old textbooks and they were the same thing. Different styles certainly, but the problem sets were basically interchange. In Algebra and Geometry, the Canadian books seemed to have much more emphasis on algebra, whereas the eastern european ones had much more emphasis on geometry.

I think the illusion comes from the different rates at which you're expected to pick things up. Grade 8 Canadian math was much easier, so I think the Canadian curriculum was backloaded - easier in the early grades and much harder in the later ones, whereas the eastern european one seemed much more even.

The whole "new math" thing was an attempt to catch up with Soviet math pedagogy, which involved much more foundations, construction, and proof, right?

The way math is taught in the US is essentially free-floating, foundation less, and understanding-free: https://profkeithdevlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/lockh...

I think the book is seen more of as a complementary thing to the teacher, not something you're expected to read and understand on your own (unless you're really smart). They give you the cold hard theory, exercises with little explanation and wish you off after that.

I'm from Eastern Europe and studied a bit of math in undergrad and I referenced mostly from American books as everything else was just terrible to learn from. I even read a portion of Spivaks Calculus, which was difficult but great.

My linear algebra teacher was this older mathematician from soviet, who had emigrated to the west in the early 90s. In some casual talks we had, the topic around school systems was brought up - and at least according to him, the old soviet system had a demanding common curriculum, but also one where exceptional students were easily identified and supported.

I was talking to someone two nights ago who grew up in the USSR. I grew up on Australia. The common thread was after school clubs, and a well funded state run and centralised system for spotting talent, and then scholarships to institutions set up to develop the talent. In Australia the club's are mostly sport, and they fed into the Australian Institute of Sport (which gave you a good rounded education for when you didn't get rich and famous, plus the specialist stuff). The soviets had sports, maths, chess, gymnastics, music ...

One factor that influenced this was the lack of what we consider "nerd culture" in the Soviet Union. To be a nerd, you had to study science. There was no other way. No comic books, no movies. So yeah, math it is.

To paraphrase my old Soviet physics professor:

What separates US and Soviet education systems is that in the former, they try to polish everyone into a diamond, while in the latter they sift through the sand to find the nuggets of gold with maximum efficiency.

supposedly because USSR didn't care much about most of the students, they wrote hardcore books such that a talented student in a remote village will get the knowledge and contribute to building rockets in the future. No one cared for the remaining 99.9 percent of students and their pointless struggles

It's a common trope that because Soviets had few resources, they were forced to think more. Not sure how true it is.

On a slight tangent, I noticed a similar dynamic with debugging. Most people I meet prefer debugging by walking through the code line by line. I prefer to sit back and think where is a human likely to make a mistake, and then go there. For some reason this way finds bugs very quickly. That said, it's all moot now that LLMs.

You might want to check out Moscow State's "Jewish Problems" (hard math problems to throw in people's way): https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

FWIW, in my limited experience, this mostly holds for undergraduate level, and the gap is much closer for post-graduate textbooks.

Hence why scientific research is not really worse in the US compared to Russia, as dumb as using textbook as a proxy for development can be.

One past thread. Others?

Why are Soviet math textbooks so hardcore in comparison to US textbooks? (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941144 - April 2020 (661 comments)

I think echoes of this still exist in Eastern European aptitude.

I've worked with a lot of outsourced development/contractors in my time. Consistently, the best experiences have been with Eastern Europeans.

Because in Soviet block getting education was not mandatory. Today every single parent wishes their kid to get PhD, and pretty .ich everyone is getting some sort of university degree.

Scarcity leads to innovation? Sort of like evolutionary pressure makes species evolve?

About all I see in this discussion is people assertively declaring their biases.

Because US schools are mostly about repetition and not about thinking critically or independently.

In Canada they still learn multiplication table in fifth grade, while I was done with multiplication table in my first grade in USSR. I know a math teacher in pre-university college (cegep in quebec) and she is from ex-USSR country and according to her the students coming from high school have very minimal grasp of mathematics and those are the students who go to study engineering and science in university.

Because nobody complains in a dictatorship about anything. Everything is perfect by definition.

Having worked with East Europeans (Romanians, Polish and Russian) in math heavy domains, the answer I can give is: Culture.

Over here it's acceptable not to know basic things like how to do long division as an adult. In many countries (not just East European), that makes you a "moron". My mother, who hated academics, was never a good student, and refused to go to college, can do all the basic arithmetic on paper. Not because she liked it (she hates math). But because she didn't want to be perceived as a "moron".

Now when you get to Russia, etc - if you want to go into an engineering field, knowing arithmetic on paper is not sufficient. So the bar is raised a lot higher. Even if your career is not going to involve calculus, if you can't integrate by parts simply expressions, you are a "moron" in the tech circle.

They also have "mathematics circles". Kind of like a math club. You get a core set of people (probably less than 10), who meet regularly and work on different math problems. People at differing skill levels in one circle. They learn from one another. The focus is on improving problem solving skills (and fun).

That's why the Russians I worked with in the US were really, really concerned about their kids' education. All they saw were "morons" graduating high school. So the (physical) bulletin board at work often had math tutoring services targeting Russian kids.

I'm guessing that's why the "Russian School of Mathematics" exists in the US.

There are, of course, downsides to being perceived as a moron if you can't do long division or basic differentiation. At the same time, I think it does speak ill of American society that there's simply no bar when it comes to academic knowledge and skills. I wouldn't advocate that you should be considered a moron if you can't do long division. I do think there should be some baseline in society, though.

Right now, it's OK to:

- Not know the difference between cents and dollars. Verizon Math opened my eyes to this, and now I see it everywhere. And people around me don't see the problem - not in the sense of "Why are you making a fuss about this?" but "I don't understand what you're talking about: 0.5c is half a dollar!" I don't bring it up any more lest I be viewed as elitist (by people with advanced engineering degrees).

- Not knowing the number of days in a year or the number of days in a month.

- Not knowing if there is gravity on the moon.

The list goes on and on.

Because nobody complains in a dictatorship about anything.

False rigor is common among societies that are economically behind. Same reason poor schools mandate uniforms.

I grew up with students being given grades or scores to easily digest how we are doing and the computation of that grade is very open, like 80% test results 10% classroom participation and 10% project score. I think it's like that can't recall it is too long ago.

Now my kids are being educated and they track them with just three words and I even forgot the words. LOL. Something like this. Progressing is one of the word, mastering something something. I forgot the word for struggling since my child didn't have it. It is still absurd and it's hard to know how the kid is progressing. They still do test and some teachers are discouraging doing assignments. Weird timeline we are in.

The reason is Soviets wanted to catch up to the Western world in science.

That's it, there is no other explanation.

Stalin took the reigns of a devastated, poor, agricultural society and left it as a nuclear armed superpower who won WW2. The State had the goal of being a strong state and educating its people to be strong people

I think there are many reasons and this is just one marker of general education decline in the US. Chrystal's 2 volume Algebra books could hardly be completed by first year university students nowadays, and they are from the turn of the 20th century. I had an American high school physics text from 1948 with dense text, math formulas, and nicely hand-drawn illustrations that served me well in 1976 a few years before I went to High School. By the time I went to university, textbooks started to put in a lot of photos, diagrams, marginalia, and tangent facts, or distractions from uninterrupted development of the ideas students are expected to handle. The shift from books my mom bought me, like The Boy Engineer, which was filled with optimism and enthusiasm for engineering throughout the ages gave way to texts filled with impending disasters, pollution, chemicals, plastics, expected zero-risk in all things. Russian math books are rigorous and thorough, and I have found Indian science and engineering texts to be good for their explanation and continuous development of the core idea, and relevant, graded drills. I have 5 kids ranging from 7 to 29, and I the American text books I have perused for them have become massive and bloated with too much tangent material, distractions. Let's see for my younger ones. They mainly do all work at school, not much homework, and texts seemed to be endless worksheets coming from newsprint workbooks that spread the main point across pages instead of paragraphs. Math is OK, but very segmented, but at least there are some word problems or contextual exercises to get them into applying the math. Let's see when they hit high school. And although I had a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977 with 8k RAM (later 32k upgrade, tell Sam, I know the value of RAM!), a cassette drive, and Commodore BASIC in ROM, I am not a fan of the screen vs. teaching and books, or boards (whiteboards, or screens). I also just watched, "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die", so this is some fallout... Going to first principles is sometimes a big ask, but skipping everything after a Google search, and deriving a small part on your own is not the way to hypertrophy of the brain. I started looking over the first 3 chapters of Euclid's Elements (Greek on left, English on right, and diagrams) and started to work on it with hopes of dragging my 7 and 11-year-old through some exercises to teach them thought processes in looking at and solving a problem. Then again the Russians faked an advanced fighter/bomber MIG-25, and this pushed America to develop the F-15 in the 70s. It turned out the MIG-25 was heavy (built of nickel steel), hand riveted, and vacuum tube based! I guess you can't judge a book by its cover here.

The article gives the response, doesn't it? The necessity of the math in military research made them so hardcore ...

Here in California, apparently algebra is "too hard" for 8th graders.. the tests scores look bad, so "algebra" is now a target of political action.. to remove it.

Seriously, public schools in California are proposing removing the advanced math classes completely. This is not an old story, this is now.

There was some emergent property of the communist countries, compared to the capitalist ones, that made them want to produce large numbers of highly educated professionals in specific fields, the Eastern bloc with engineers as well as Cuba with doctors. I suspect there are many factors but it should be considered that licensing boards prioritize career safety for existing professionals.

It's legacy of a of hardcore state-backed rationalist ideology of thr USSR.

Soviet doctrine treated Marxism as an objective, scientific law (I believe that's partially how the ruling class enforced to legitimize its power). Combined with post-WWII competition in space and computing, this mindset institutionalized rigorous STEM education, creating a massive pipeline of uncompromising textbooks, teachers, mathematicians, and engineers.

This partially explains why egineers from former-ussr places are good. They are taught by those and with materials which were produced by above mentioned processes.

Teachers' unions in the United States are dedicated to two things:

  - increasing pay and benefits for teachers to the maximum possible
  - reducing accountability for poor teaching to the minimum possible

Because, unlike the US, USSR had an actual education system.

My Finnish friends showed me their high school math books, which were subjects that I took during my first two years of undergraduate math. One of my friends graduated US high school, and re-enrolled in Finnish high school because her coursework was so retarded.

It wasn’t always this way. For most of the twentieth century, American schools were advanced when compared to foreign schools.

It’s mostly due to broad lowered standards and expectations, low standards for teaching, phony credentials. But the US DOE hasn’t helped either. It would be best to move its entitlements to another agency, and abolish the remainder. It’s overseen the biggest academic decline over the past 50 years. Outside of the entitlements, even its supporters couldn’t name a single good policy.

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