Why So Many Top Hackers Hail from Russia
I think this stems in part from the &quot;oh I&#x27;m so bad at math&quot; culture we have in the US, where its almost expected that most kids won&#x27;t be good at mathematics. The side effect of this, imo, is that fields that are close to math or dependent on it (physics, stats, CS, etc.) pick up a piece of that stigma and idea that its acceptable to be bad at these things.<p>I&#x27;ve seen occasional articles about quants on wall street and how a good number of them are Russian&#x2F;Eastern European (this kind of thing - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-01-21&#x2F;how-russia-has-lost-its-mathematical-minds-to-the-west" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2016-01-21&#x2F;how-russi...</a> ) and I feel this is another directly related element - having a strong math culture allows you to have a strong CS culture.<p>I&#x27;ve been happy to see that in the last decade, the US is starting to start bringing the pieces we need to get that kind of culture back - the popularity of startups and programming with the media that bring them to the attention of the average person. Space is cool again, and movies like &quot;The Martian&quot; are, imo, absolutely critical in making science&#x2F;engineering something worth striving for. Hopefully we&#x27;ll see some of this trickle down to our educational systems in the near future.