Selectivity, in the relevant sense, is more than just a question of how many people are granted something.
Of course. There’s the number of potential participants, self selection, and so on.
How many people are not on that site, but could rank highly if they chose to try? I’m guessing it’s far more than the number of people who have never taken part in the IMO, but who could get a gold medal if they did.
IMO is a highschool event, and ‘taking part’ in terms of actually winning entails a lot of very specific training instead of education.
(The IMO is more prestigious among mathematicians than topcoder is among programmers. And countries actively recruit their best mathematicians for the IMO. Nobody in the Finnish government thought it would be a good idea to convince and train Linus Torvalds to take part in an internet programming competition, so I doubt Linus Torvalds is on topcoder.)
Nobody can recruit Grigori Perelman for IMO, either.
There’s ACM ICPC, which is roughly the programming equivalent of IMO . Finalists have huge overlap with TC. edit: more current . Of course, TC lacks the prestige of ACM ICPC , but on the other hand it is not a school event.
There certainly are things as selective or more than the IMO (for example, the Fields medal), but I don’t think topcoder is one of them, and I’m not convinced about “plenty”. (Plenty for what purpose?)
Plenty for the purpose of coming across that volume of technical brilliance and noting and elevating it to its rightful place by now. Less facetiously: a lot of people know everything that was presented in the QM paper, and of those pretty much everyone either considers MWI to be an open question, an irrelevant question, or the like.
Of course. There’s the number of potential participants, self selection, and so on.
IMO is a highschool event, and ‘taking part’ in terms of actually winning entails a lot of very specific training instead of education.
Nobody can recruit Grigori Perelman for IMO, either.
There’s ACM ICPC, which is roughly the programming equivalent of IMO . Finalists have huge overlap with TC. edit: more current . Of course, TC lacks the prestige of ACM ICPC , but on the other hand it is not a school event.
Plenty for the purpose of coming across that volume of technical brilliance and noting and elevating it to its rightful place by now. Less facetiously: a lot of people know everything that was presented in the QM paper, and of those pretty much everyone either considers MWI to be an open question, an irrelevant question, or the like.
edit: made clearer with quotations.
Perelman is an IMO gold medalist.
Hmm. Good point. My point was though that you can’t recruit adult mathematicians for it.