Recently, Ping Jiang (姜萍), a female student from a vocational high school (generally considered to be less "prestigious" than other high schools in China), was able to excel at 2024 Alibaba Global Mathematics competition.

This inspired an open letter from 39 finalists of the competition (first 2 pics below), accusing Jiang of cheating and requesting the publication of Jiang's answer for the entire competition.

The evidences for cheating?
1. Jiang writes Σ like 2̅.
2. There exists one "sin π𝑧" on the board that looks like "sin πᶻ".
See the third picture below.

Personally, I don't see how people write Σ would reflect their mathematical ability; and the place she writes sin π𝑧 like sin πᶻ can very well be a result of her penmanship.

I do value fairness in competitions and in life, but from my perspective, this letter failed to provide any reasonable evidence of cheating. And *it is very disheartening to see baseless attacks on under-privileged young female math students like these*. I also cannot imagine they would raise the same concern if she is from one of the more prestigious universities around the world.

Source:
- the site of Yejia (Richard) Xu, who leds the effort the draft the open letter: https://sites.google.com/view/yejiaxu/ . There is a link to his zhihu (Quora-like social media in China), where he posted the open letter.
- The open letter on zhihu (also attached below, with English translation provided by the original authors of the letter): https://www.zhihu.com/question/659628342/answer/3539037805
- News report about Jiang by AP news: https://apnews.com/article/china-vocational-school-math-competition-8506fe6ce1a7bca6a5aea54da8de265c

#mathematics #competion #PingJiang #JiangPing