No. 1 and Counting

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

If the United States sends six kids to the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong, where a perfect individual score is 42, and together they score 252, does the country have reason to cheer?

If you can't answer that one, then you desperately need a remedial course in arithmetic (or perhaps just new batteries in your calculator). The U.S. team members, all public high-school students, started out by competing against 350,000 of their peers on the American High School Mathematics Examination, aced two tougher exams, and prepped for a month at the U.S. Naval Academy. Only then did they board a plane and become the first squad in the Math Olympiad's 35-year history to get perfect scores across the board, out- stripping 68 other nations to win the competition.

That our boys (there were no girls on the team this year) were operating at an exalted level is clear by a glance at the test questions, which featured few of what most Americans would recognize as numbers. One of them read as follows: "Show that there exists a set A of positive integers with the following property: for any infinite set S of primes there exist positive integers m in A and n not in A each of which is a product of k distinct elements of S for some k greater than 1."

Less self-evident than their prowess was the exact significance of the American victory. "They showed the world!" suggests the justifiably proud U.S. coach, Walter Mientka, a math professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

But what did they show it? The cold war tensions that must have made a cliffhanger out of the 1986 competition, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. tied for best cumulative score, are now history.

And it certainly stretches credulity to portray team member Jonathan Weinstein, 17 -- who recalls solving quadratic equations on restaurant place mats at age "four . . . or maybe five" -- as a typical product of an exemplary school system. In fact, a 1993 Department of Education study described what it called a "quiet crisis" in education for the gifted; programs proudly initiated in the 1970s and 1980s to nurture their talents have often been the first victims of the rash of state budget cuts.

So, what's to cheer about? Well, one can always celebrate the sheer presence of extraordinary individual achievement. Mientka notes that several of his charges solved their problems in ways unanticipated by the judges. "You can almost see what happened in their cranium," he says. "And it's quite amazing. The point is, gosh, how could a student ever think of this?"

And for those not sufficiently enthused, there's still that old, but not discredited, Olympic ideal: international brotherhood. Between equations, reports Weinstein, the Americans got to know the Croatian squad, who brought along a guitar. Soon, the new friends were harmonizing to old Beatles tunes. Anyone know the words to When I'm (Positive Integer) 64?

With reporting by Francis Moriarty/Hong Kong and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York