Harvard’s international community continues to bring extraordinary levels of talent and brilliance to the student body, even after not being allowed on campus for an entire school year.
Vladimir Aleksandrosrovich Petrov joined the Class of 2024 this year after transferring from Presidential Physics and Mathematics Lyceum No. 239. The twenty-year-old matherite and Mathematics concentrator moved from St. Petersburg, Russia to a world of revolutionary people, experiences, and lifestyles at Harvard. It doesn’t take much time after meeting Petrov to recognize that his mindset towards his time both here at Harvard and in the United States contrasts those of many other students. Petrov is best described as a “math olympian,” as a former team member on the Russian National team and Silver and Gold Medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiads (IMO) in 2019 and 2018, respectively.
Competition and the thirst for victory has been in his blood from a young age. As a former pre-professional figure skater, Petrov views “life as a sport.” He says the culture of high-performance athletics in Russia differs vastly from that of the United States. The highly competitive nature of youth Russian athletics, demand for time management skills, and commitment to personal improvement translates rather seamlessly into math olympiads and life in the competitive math world.
The annual World Championship Mathematics Competition (IMO) hosts high school students from over 100 countries each year and covers content ranging from pre-calculus and advanced algebra to unconventional mathematics beyond the college level, including projective and complex geometry, combinatorics, and well-grounded number theory. The principle behind IMO content is that any contestant, regardless of their extent of mathematical background, can theoretically solve any problem. Petrov articulates this first by asking me what the product of eight and seven is, and then by following up with the reassuring notion that “The IMO could give a person like you any problem and that you could probably figure it out.” However, the difficulty in these problems lies in the amount of creativity that is required in coming up with possible solutions. This is exactly what Petrov appreciates and even misses about school in Russia.
“In US schools, mathematical education is considerably weaker than in Russian schools,” he says. “I don’t think that is good. Not everyone needs to study real analysis, but going through this process makes you feel f*cking stupid. But then you realize the answer and why you feel stupid and you then you’re okay with the process. This is something important that I feel like lots of people need to experience.” The beauty of approaching difficult math problems such as those provided by the IMO is that success in solving the problem isn’t a reflection of how many techniques or theories each student can regurgitate. Rather, it is a measure of the sheer persistence and determination that the student has in devising creative solutions.
Petrov’s passion towards this challenge that high level math presents and his desire for American students to experience it has legitimate principles. Especially at Harvard, where natural intelligence yields almost expected success, students often enter the College with little experience with failure. As many students experience the last four years of their academic careers and start to transition into the corporate world, college classes are one of the few places where failure is both entirely possible but also entirely okay. Petrov emphasizes that the beauty of failure (especially in mathematics) lies in the potential to overcome it, and that what differentiates American students from those in Russia is how much of it we welcome.
After forcing myself through two Computer Science weeder-courses (both of which successfully weeded me out), I can safely say that failure isn’t something that Harvard students are safe from. Yet the beauty of realizing this now is that we will be able to recognize and recover when something goes wrong.