It's my contention that these activities (math, chess, etc.) are sports, yet the participants are not atheletes.

Also, at my high school, not only could you letter in math, mock trial and chess, but you could letter in academics if you were in the top 10% of your class.

If I had somehow convinced my teammates to wear black shirts saying "Hell's Angels," ten minutes later I would have found my entire team in the nurse's office after they got the crap kicked out of them.

Probably so, but if you had instead had the T-Shirts say "Hell's Angles", as did Ellenberg's team, you probably would have only been razzed to death.

Dan says he was on the "Connecticut A" math team but the link to "my high school" is to Avon High of Avon, OHIO! Is this some kind of Valerie Palme coverup? "Daniel Drezner" - if that is your real name! Can anyone vouch for the fact that DD even went to High School?

Arrggh -- fixed now.

I'm waiting for Jay Drezner to weigh in with some dirt on Dan's high school years. Preferably with photos.

I will now throw down the pedantry and remind Dan that ARML, when he and I competed in it, stood for Atlantic Region Mathematics League.

Ah, the glory of 1985... good times. I believe I still have my royal blue vinyl Montgomery County Math Team jacket with the hypercube on the back and my name stitched on the front.

I wonder if getting the crap kicked out of you for being a nerd was more common then than now. In my highschool era of '67-'71 it was the era of attempted monoculture of coolness in teens. There had been jocks, hoods, and brains. With the addition of the freaks the culture began to coalesce: everyone majored in being a teenager and minored in one or two of the subcultures. Because math geeks got pummeled, math teams disappeared. (We still secretly competed in the yearly MAA exams, but they just took the top three scores and totalled them. Not really competition.)

My Gen X son and his friends identified nothing uncool about being one of the kids on math team. Kids who weren't interested just shrugged. My Gen Y sons have found actual support and compliments from non-math students. It's a different culture.

I would have loved to have swaggered, if someone had given me half a chance.

My town had two public highschools. One had about 1,400 kids and the other, mine, had about 750. Our cross-town rivalry in sports wasn't much of a rivalry. They would crush us in football every year and when basketball season roled around they would crush us again and the crowd would chant "football rejects" during the game. It became tradition. However, when the confrence math championships came around they finished second and we took the top spot. On the bus ride home (we shared a bus with them because math teams are small and we were from the same town) we chanted "math team rejects" most of the way. Our teacher made us write apology letters later.

I think it ought to be, if only because we really should encourage our culture into valuing mental ability more than physical ability. It's the smart people that oughtta be making all the important decisions.

Of course, I recall being on our school's MATHCOUNTS team, so I'm probably a little bit biased.

Holy cow. I just took the autism spectrum test DD linked in this post and I scored a 42. That's higher than any female in the study. No wonder I'm at work doing technical stuff and compulsively cramming info into my head on a friday night. argh.

“when I competed at the Olympiad, there were plenty of skinny eccentrics, with a promiscuous hippie here and there”

I’m a warped human being who could care less about somebody knowing that 2+2 might equal 4. The only thing that gets my attention is the sleazy sex stuff. I want to learn more about the promiscuous hippies. Please provide names and and salacious details. Was there a special Playboy edition?

Today on my lunch break at work I was accosted by poker 'activists' shouting about the need to include poker in the Olympics and handing me a flyer for this site - http://www.pokerinathens.org. I mean, it's not really serious, but then again, it IS on ESPN, you know, the *sports* network. Poker = BIG and AWESOME!

Actually, I spent time both on the football team (four years: frosh, JV, 2 yrs varsity) _and_ one year (junior) on the math team. (Time-space frame: Grossmont High School, east San Diego county, 1967-71.) I did letter in football my senior year, but only because our team went all the way to the San Diego CIF championship game, and Coach Roberts promised that _everyone_ would letter if that happened. I was a perennial 2nd string weak-side offensive lineman (and small for my position).

On the other hand, I did win the "Highest GPA on the football team" award my senior year. And no one beat me up for being on the math team (or in the choir, or on the speech team...)

True story: the year I was on the math team, all five members of the team were male, white, myopic, and left-handed. And you wonder where nerd stereotypes come from....

i'm pretty sure there were no athletes on my mathletes team... no, one girl played tennis, but i'm pretty sure she was the only one who wasn't a hardcore nerd. most of the math team was also in the science club. i chose to avoid the science club like the plague, b/c all they actually did was clean the animal cages in the biology room.

Howard Wall, an economist now at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis commented during 1988 that Track and Field should not be an event at the Seoul Olympics. His definition of a sport was that a participant had to be able to interfere with the performance of an opposing participant. So, we all joked that sprinting would be a sport if they could hit each other with sticks. By this definition math isn't a sport either, unless spitballs are allowed.

P.S. I was on the math team in high school too, and we actually tried very hard to get our principal to come to a meet, but it was a no go.

Is this love of jocks vs nerds a peculiarly Anglo-Western issue?

While smart kids are dweebier than usual everywhere in the universe, I would wager -- based on extremely limited observations abroad -- that the high school valedictorian is a lot more of a chick magnet for status seeking girls in Asia than the typical sports star. They know the jock is hunkier but they also know quite early on which one is likely to get the big stock options.