A genius bursting onto the scene, or a manufactured god?

Everyone, a story has been flooding the internet recently. In Lianshui County, Huai'an, Jiangsu, a 17-year-old vocational high school girl named Jiang Ping, although studying fashion design, relied on her unfathomable talent outside of class. Under the careful guidance of her teacher Wang Runqiu, her mathematical ability exploded in just two years: from a level where she couldn't even finish the high school entrance exam paper, to standing out from 801 participants in the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition, pulling off an upset and taking 12th place. Saying she beat a bunch of Tsinghua, Peking, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and MIT elites might not give you a clear picture, so let's talk about the people right behind her. 13th place Liu Ben, a PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and gold medalist in the Yau Shing-Tung Mathematics Competition; 14th place Ou Yu, gold medalist in China's CMO Olympiad; 16th place Zhang Xinliang, gold medalist in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Top students picked from one in ten thousand, all reduced to her backdrop. Originally, topics in basic disciplines, especially mathematics, get very little public attention—for good reason: it's too hard. Mathematics is like the ocean; everyday arithmetic is at most the microbes on the surface, while the real deep-sea monsters—Riemann functions and the like—you've never even heard of. This is completely different from geopolitics—everyone can chime in on geopolitics, but mathematics truly leaves no room for casual comment, so no one is interested in discussing it. So Dr. Liu Ben becoming famous as "the thirteenth runner-up" and the competition itself gaining visibility—they all have to thank this vocational high school girl Jiang Ping. Because her story is simply too legendary: grassroots comeback, heaven-sent genius, female hero, a talent scout with a unique eye, unconventional recruitment—all these elements are maxed out. It's so spectacular that every journalism student wants to ride this wave of energy to bring aloof mathematics back down to the plains of public understanding. It's like a group of grandmasters at the Huashan Sword Contest suddenly being joined by an innocent small-town girl who, with just a slight move, stuns everyone and suppresses all the top young disciples of the major orthodox sects. Everyone is curious how her martial arts could be so exquisite, and she says she practices the Taizu Long Fist, Shaolin Flower-Picking Hand, and the Persian Sacred Fire Order. This confuses the various heroes even more, but the onlookers, having regained their language ability, are already cheering, moved, exclaiming at her extraordinary talent, and demanding on the spot that the sect leaders make an exception and take Jiang Ping as a disciple. Interviews and publicity pour in, and even the shopping mall in Lianshui is broadcasting congratulations to her. Lianshui isn't big, but it produces top students. Rationally speaking, this is quite good. Everyone's life needs a beam of light, and it would be even better if we could confirm the authenticity of the light source. Of course I strongly hope everything is real, and I hope she pursues her beautiful dreams. But many details of this story have made even me, with highly limited verification ability, start to doubt: where exactly is this star-making movement heading? The first thing that made me suspicious was the promotional video shot by the organizers. In the video, she solves a proof problem on the blackboard. Judging from the handwriting, the board writing should all be her own, while the red notes in the book come from her teacher Wang Runqiu. The writing in the book has no problems other than being a bit ugly, but the blackboard writing is somewhat unreasonable: the summation symbol ∑ was written as a "semicolon and 2," factors were written as exponents, and γ was written as t. You could say these are all personal writing habits, but could it be that this is caused by her unfamiliarity with the teacher's writing habits? In other words, she is merely copying the teacher's handwritten formulas without actually recognizing these mathematical symbols. As a layperson, I can only speculate through the notes, and it doesn't count for much—after all, many math masters write in wild cursive too. But some Zhihu experts have already, without considering the writing errors, written out the problem on the blackboard in full and analyzed it, concluding that the formulas on the blackboard are abrupt and logically incoherent—mainly something laypeople can't understand and experts can't bear to read. Teachers who have seen the exam paper say that Jiang Ping's answers use accurate terminology, she is proficient in LaTeX, and her answer sheet level surpasses 95% of mathematics majors—they couldn't reach that level of completion within the allotted time. That makes me even more curious: a document typesetting tool—if you don't need to write papers, what's the necessity of mastering it? Isn't self-studying mathematics already time-consuming enough? I'm also puzzled: why would someone with such accurate terminology say "studied about Xie Huimin's mathematics aspects" instead of "read Xie Huimin's Mathematical Analysis"? It's like someone asking you what classic novel you like best, and you say you like "about Cao Xueqin's dream aspects." I'm not necessarily doubting that her terminology is rote-memorized, but for example, PDE—if asked in another way, "Are you good at partial differential equations?" she might answer, "A middle part isn't ugly either." In an interview, she said the geometry problems in the preliminary round had complex diagrams, she couldn't solve them, and there was no way to intuitively represent their three-dimensional form. But the preliminary round had no solid geometry at all, nor anything requiring diagrams; if diagrams were needed, it means the problem wasn't understood. If she didn't score on those problems, then the other problems would need to be near perfect to achieve a score of 93—but the other problems involved neither mathematical analysis nor partial differential equations—which is exactly what she claims to be good at. Even more suspiciously, when she talks about mathematics she shows no love at all, but rather a woodenness of reciting a script—let's attribute that to pressure in front of the camera; but when the topic turns to fashion pattern-making, saying clothes are divided into left and right pieces, her body language immediately becomes confident and natural. Perhaps that is her familiar territory. No wonder many netizens turned into Detective Conan and dug up the monthly exam score sheet from Lianshui Vocational High School: Jiang scored 83 in math, standing out among classmates with scores in the 30s and 40s. But this school is full of hidden talents; she could only place third in her grade, with the first-place student Ding scoring 99 in math. I can't imagine how many competition-trained math majors from elite schools this Chinese cuisine major would crush if he competed. I'm being a bit harsh, but I really don't mean to discriminate based on educational background—among the finalists, many are not from elite schools either; if you search carefully, you can find their competition trajectories over the years. For example, a student from Jiangxi University of Applied Science who upgraded from a junior college has now made the finals for the fourth consecutive year; two computer science students from a college in Shaoxing have won many math modeling competitions; even younger middle school students, Deng Leyan from Shanghai and Luo Siyuan from Hunan, have left various competition records over the past two years. I can only say that everything in this world leaves traces. But Jiang Ping is still striving upward. On this point, I think the outside world had best not disturb her; the various god-making and personal attack messages online should be subject to official intervention. People's Daily put it quite aptly: the boundaries of expression must still be maintained, and one must never consume others' privacy for traffic. But this doesn't mean doubters should shut up. First, doubting her is absolutely not because she is the only girl in the top thirty—using gender to shut people up is really strange. Saying some petty-minded boys are triggered and can't stand a girl doing better than them—even if such psychologically twisted people exist, can they be considered mainstream? If you insist that society tends to judge women and protect men, then may I ask: when Zhai Tianlin was caught faking, was it because of gender? Most people who can't tolerate sand in their eyes are not targeting her personally, but questioning the god-making in civilian competitions. If Jiang Ping truly has real talent and learning, that's wonderful—an innate math saint body; having such a student is truly a blessing for the country. But if it's just a clay idol in a small temple pretending to be a Vajra Buddha body, would you still be willing to burn incense and bow? If everyone is OK with that, then within a few years, competition god-making could become an industry. Four hundred and eighty temples of the Southern Dynasties, how many towers in the misty rain—what the misty rain shrouds is the shortcut into the ivory tower: ordinary kids outside can only squeeze across the single-plank bridge, while geniuses who have won awards can be specially recruited. As for what awards they've won, that depends on what kind of deity the parents are and what competitions they can manipulate to get their child what awards. The competition path is an upward channel for lopsided geniuses; the state does not encourage everyone to squeeze into it, so it only recognizes the five major subject Olympiads in math, physics, chemistry, biology, and informatics, and has canceled their bonus points in the college entrance exam. Only members selected for the national training team can be recommended for admission. This is to set the standard for genius high enough to directly discourage utilitarian players with a bit of cleverness and avoid stimulating competition fever. Of course, the side effect is obvious: vocational high school students without high school registration are directly shut out, possibly missing a pearl. So can civilian competitions fill this gap? Maybe, but the Alibaba competition cannot. It cannot be denied that the Alibaba competition has some influence in professional circles and internationally, but the basic fact is that it is an online exam with no invigilation: the preliminary round lasts 48 hours and is open-book; the final is any 8 hours within 24 hours and is closed-book. But whether open-book or closed-book, discussion and leaking of questions are not allowed, and the rules weakly state: "Contestants please take the exam with integrity." So what—if you don't have integrity, what are you going to do about it? Since there is no invigilation, how do you ensure integrity? Even if the final has cameras and audio recording, prohibits frequent switching of applications—I don't know if screen recording is done, and even if it is, can these measures really eliminate cheating behaviors like teaming up, multi-screen chatting, subcontracting to find gunslingers, multiple people comparing answers, and opening multiple accounts to exploit time differences? If not, what can you analyze from saving contestant recordings? I won't question the matter of Teacher Wang previously competing with students and getting the same score—I can consider it a coincidence in multiple-choice questions. But the mechanism itself: could several contestants cooperate, first get the problems and work them out, then give on-site guidance to contestants who compete later? If the possibility of cheating cannot be reduced to near zero, then it cannot be regarded as a reasonable screening mechanism. In such a competition, due to the lack of a deterrent punishment mechanism, the magnitude of contestants' motivation to cheat is inversely correlated with their degree of love for mathematics. I am willing to believe that all contestants love mathematics, but the problem is that variables don't stop there—besides mathematics, don't people have other hobbies? For example, money. The Alibaba competition prize money is quite generous: gold prize $30,000, silver $15,000, bronze $8,000, and even the excellence award gets $5,000. By comparison, the top five in the American Mathematics Competition AMC share a total of $5,000; the Putnam Mathematical Competition gives at most $2,500; and the IMO gives no money at all. I do not hesitate to speculate on human nature with the worst malice: as long as there is a possibility of profit, there will inevitably be people whose purpose is profit; and as long as there are people whose purpose is profit, there will always be ways to engage in unfair competition. And profit has many forms—not necessarily just money, but also fame and status. So even if the original intention of encouraging with money is good, the possibility of unfair competition driven by interests is hard to rule out; it's best for gatherings of like-minded enthusiasts to be pure. If you love, please love purely. But what I oppose at the core is not actually math masters participating in civilian competitions for fun when their research duties are light, and incidentally earning some extra cash—nor am I saying they compete just to win money; of course it could also be for the joy of solving problems, since the Alibaba competition problems are indeed cleverly designed. What I mean is: it can only be for fun; you cannot rely on it for selection. The all-star lineup of contestants actually proves this point in reverse—everyone is an academic elite already screened by the global education system, long since discovered and specially cultivated; true geniuses have no need to prove themselves by standing out in the Alibaba competition. And the simple, kind-hearted onlookers think they are helping the weak grow wings. Have they ever considered what exactly their call for exceptional admission is breaking? It's the standards for talent selection. No matter how many flaws the existing standards have—you can call them rigid and mechanical—at least they have one thing: they are uniformly fair. Once the standards become overly complex, room for manipulation appears, giving rise to all kinds of makeshift arenas: at first glance they all seem highly valuable—outsiders don't understand anyway—convenient for packaging geniuses and achieving stable mass production of exceptions. These would no longer be overlooked pearls of the academic system, but engineering hammers smashing through the fortress of education. The fortress's bricks are thick, and its moat is wide and deep. But fortunately, these difficulties were created by the intellectual world and have not merged with social power and wealth. Once it is breached, those entering the city will absolutely not be the thousands of troops on the single-plank bridge, but only the children of various bosses and leaders. Isn't it just launching academic satellites? Just you wait—it will definitely be more spectacular than now: a genius once in a millennium, at least two every year; any high school that hasn't produced a few authors in core journals won't have the nerve to enjoy recommendation quotas. The cautionary tale for this path is the United States. Every day it loudly champions affirmative action to support disadvantaged groups, which is actually just making standards as diverse as possible to cover for favoring the rich. The result is that rich second-generation kids from the top 1% of families account for one-sixth of Ivy League enrollment, more than lower-middle-class children, even though the latter make up 60%; in such schools, two-thirds of students come from the top 20% of affluent families, and after graduation they obtain advanced degrees and naturally become the new high-income group. Everyone says don't judge heroes by degrees, but Fortune 500 companies only recruit on elite campuses—this is an unchanging reality. What is elite education? It is education serving exclusively the elite class. In other words, no matter how technology develops or how industries reshuffle, higher education is a resource highland. As long as there are loopholes in talent standards, the privileged class will exploit them and tilt real resources toward themselves, ultimately leading to class solidification. This is the greatest nightmare of a civilian society. The most ironic thing is that some people clearly stand with the majority of ordinary people, yet want to tear down rigid standards, thinking they are delivering the world's tenderness—this is being sold and still helping count the money. If one day competitions are turned into a full-chain god-making industry, they will have nothing to complain about, at most a sigh.