Asian parents often also hit children who don't learn their multiplication tables.

I don't believe for a second that understanding of math is at all correlated to efficiently storing and manipulating raw numbers in your brain.

If anything, it can help you survive school where inadequate teachers try to make you believe the direct opposite.

I've always attributed the excellence in mathematics to the culture and their emphasis on schooling. I have many Asian friends who grew up not knowing the language but with strict parents from these backgrounds. All of them perform above par in math, as well as school in general. Perhaps it is the language, but I have yet to see personal evidence of it.

I have to wonder, does the English language offer any improvements? Obviously it's the language of choice for most technical and scientific ventures. Is this simply because it became popular and stayed popular?

It's probably a small part of why Asians are better at math. The more salient reason is that Asian have a reputation of working harder than anyone. That's why you see Asian succeeding in the west in acquiring high status jobs and high level education more than anyone. They valued formal education more highly than anybody.

However, just because Japan and China and South Korea work harder doesn't mean they win outright all the time. For example, Samsung is the winner in many area, but they are also one of the foot soldiers for google, and they are not really good at the kind of innovation that make Apple famous.

The US may have poorly educated students in math, and our programmers may be relatively less formally educated. We still kick ass, for some reason or another

I think it's a pretty big jump to say that this language difference is why Asians are often better at math. Maybe it is a contributing factor, particularly in younger grades when students are just learning arithmetic... but at some point, know how to do arithmetic. I'd make a guess that education style and social factors have a lot more to do with it.