Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Euclid’s Elements
- Hardy–Ramanujan letters
- Terman study
- SMPY founded
- IMO coaching industrialises
- Gagné DMGT
- Benbow & Lubinski follow-ups
- Dehaene number-sense work
- Mirzakhani Fields Medal
- Macnamara education band
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Does this atlas rank groups by IQ, race or nation?
No. Pathways and evidence stay individual. Scores are browsing aids — never group biological or racial ranks.
What did SMPY change?
Above-level SAT at 12–13 revealed residual differences among the already high, and later adult outcomes in STEM.
Are olympiad medals a gift assay?
They measure contest craft under a syllabus. Coaching density (China, Korea, Russia физмат) is already in the score.
Did Ramanujan prove genes are everything?
He also had the Cambridge correspondence and a tradition of temple-school calculation. A jagged profile, not a racial parable.
Is fast arithmetic the talent?
It is one visible skill. Proof, modelling and spatial insight can be quiet in timed tests.
Do girls “lack” maths talent?
This page will not run that folk story. Participation, stereotype and coaching explain much of historic gaps; we do not rank sexes as essences.
Binet’s school tests included number. Terman treated high IQ as proto-maths genius. Stanley’s 1971 SMPY finally measured maths itself above the grade ceiling.
The timeline below follows dated arguments and institutions, not a national myth of genius and not a group ranking.
Origin
1900s–1971 · France tests to Johns Hopkins — Binet’s school tests included number. Terman treated high IQ as proto-maths genius. Stanley’s 1971 SMPY finally measured maths itself above the grade ceiling.
Timeline
- Euclid’s Elements
Proof as a public talent display in Alexandria’s orbit.
- Hardy–Ramanujan letters
A jagged, self-taught profile enters Cambridge.
- Terman study
High IQ as a stand-in — too global, too Californian.
- SMPY founded
Stanley’s above-level SAT-M search at Johns Hopkins.
- IMO coaching industrialises
Socialist физмат schools and later East Asian camps.
- Gagné DMGT
Maths “gift” versus developed talent becomes a usable school diagram.
- Benbow & Lubinski follow-ups
SMPY adulthood: the tail still predicts some STEM paths.
- Dehaene number-sense work
Early magnitude skill as a cognitive starting point, not a caste.
- Mirzakhani Fields Medal
A public counter to the “who looks like a mathematician” filter.
- Macnamara education band
~4% — a warning about homework-as-conservatoire.
Eras
- Proof culture — Euclid to universities — Talent as written argument.
- Exam culture — Tripos, gaokao, SAT — Speed and syllabus as proxies.
- Search culture — SMPY / CTY — Above-level tests.
- Contest culture — IMO / olympiads — A sport with coaches.
- Imaging culture — Number sense labs — Starting points without racial stories.
Shifts
- From IQ to SAT-M 1971 — A domain test at last.
- From lone genius to camp 1980s– — Coaching became visible.
- From male default to open file 2000s– — Mirzakhani, Johnson, Kovalevskaya as ordinary syllabus, not tokens.
Mathematical talent: keep the dates visible. Names of talents are younger than the work they try to capture.
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