Download Concy Speech - Lycée Français de San Francisco

Speech by Mr. Miguel Concy, Mathematics teacher given on November 17, 2014
I know Mr. and Mrs. Evans understand French perfectly, but today I want to express myself in English
because I want Mr. and Mrs. Ren to be able to fully understand what I am about to say.
I do not want them to feel left behind – once again – in an event of our mostly French speaking school. It
is not only about not being addressed in the language of their adoptive country, but Mr. and Mrs. Ren
trusted us – the Lycée Français de San Francisco – with what is of the uttermost importance to parents:
the co-education of their two children, Ingrid and Isaac and the least the Lycée can do is to congratulate
them in a language they can fully understand.
I will let my coworker Gilles, who witnessed Chloe’s achievement from close range, talk about it in detail.
Let me just start by saying I am not surprised Chloe performed so brilliantly in an eloquence contest. I
was her Audio visual teacher last school year and I was struck by her ability– and I should say her
eagerness – to express articulated views on any movie or audiovisual document she just saw for the first
time. I still remember, the night we showed Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief at the Art&Film for
Teenagers ciné club last autumn. She proved able, at first sight, to give a thorough and extremely
sensible sociological and historical analysis of one of the movie’s spectacular vertical panning shots.
Let me go back to Isaac... To teach the highest achieving 11th grade student in the entire educational
system of your home country, including the international network of French schools abroad, is a once-ina-lifetime experience for a teacher. The La Pérouse old timers might remember how, in March 2009,
when Isaac was in 6th grade, he ranked third in the “Concours Kangourou”; a middle school French
national mathematics contest (6th and 7th graders combined). Last year, in May 2014, he ranked first in
the French National Mathematics Olympiad – tying with Arthur Nebout, a student from a Cognac private
high school, in the west of mainland France.
As both his 11th grade Math teacher and his coach for the French Olympiads, I was able to witness at
close range the details of his personality. Isaac is an outstanding problem solver, and his domain of
expertise covers — but is not limited to — a wide range of mathematics puzzles. In 30 years of practicing
and teaching math, I have rarely encountered such an ability to overcome tricky mathematical problems
with elementary tools. What Isaac knows, he perfectly masters, and he is able to use 100% of his
knowledge in an utterly efficient way that characterizes the amazing “problem solver” he has become over
the years.
Another important and positive aspect of Isaac’s personality is his humility and his generosity toward
others. One could expect such a brilliant person to be arrogant and impatient with the average slowness
of human beings he interacts with, and with others’ mistakes or inefficient thought processes, but Isaac is
precisely the opposite of an arrogant geek. He is very patient, very kind and already has a passion for
explaining mathematical concepts, thought processes and derivations. He is still very young, but you can
already tell he loves discussing mistakes and fixing invalid proofs.
This reminds me of a funny anecdote, in early March 2014 when we were in the home stretch of
“workouts” for the Olympiad. As Isaac is very busy (he plays the piano and is enrolled in elective Fine
Arts and Latin classes, two fields in which he excels as well) the only way he could take a four hour mock
Olympiad exam was to set a meeting in our (deserted) school on a Saturday morning. I remember this
sunny spring morning, only Chantal and Pauline were present at the school, to water Olivier Combeau’s
garden. Seeing how motivated and efficient he was, I had begun to serve as a sparring partner for Isaac.
On that Saturday, I “competed” with him on the 2013 Olympiad four hour test. Three hours and twenty
minutes after we started, I realized he was somehow idle. I asked him whether he needed help or
guidance. He answered no and told me he was done and was waiting for me to finish the test. When we
compared our solution to the four exercises, his were absolutely straightforward and perfect, while I had
committed two miscalculations and had fell into a geometry dead end. This is a testament to the way
Isaac is: five months before, he had not solved a single (French) Olympiad problem. But in this short
amount of time, he had succeeded in mastering the subject and understanding thoroughly the way these
problems are built and therefore be solved. This ability of his to master any subject (from Latin grammar
to abstract set theory) in a very short amount of time makes me believe Isaac is truly a genius, with
cognitive faculties going far beyond the average human being.
Right after Isaac won the French Olympiad, one of my colleagues asked me whether I thought Isaac
could potentially win the Fields Medal one day. I have been teaching for 22 years at the middle and high
school and college level, and this is the first time I must admit I could not answer, ’No’, for sure to that
question. The answer lies in whether Isaac will be able to keep the pleasure of practicing mathematics,
the desire to deepen his understanding and to nurture his problem-solving skills. Today, one can tell he is
having fun playing with mathematical objects and concepts. You can see how delighted he is each time
he overcomes a tricky problem. If he continues to like it and have fun doing it, his outstanding abilities to
create mathematics can lead him wherever he wants to go. I am definitely positive about this.
So as my late grandmother from Normandy, Margot would have said, “Isaac ira loin...si les petits cochons
ne le mangent pas.”. Let me tell you Isaac, that whatever field you choose to exert your intelligence, I am
confident you will succeed in making a difference. I do not know whether there is such thing as a
Linguistic Nobel Prize, but after all, an outstanding mathematician like John Nash was able to win the
1994 Economics Nobel prize for a result in theory of decision that was published in 1950!
I sincerely hope you will experiment in an intense and delightful mathematical journey, Isaac.