Math as a magical subject
by John Mighton
WHEN I WAS A CHILD I read a story about two children who( somehow) used a Möbius strip to travel in time. Because I had spent a good deal of my childhood reading stories of this sort, I remember thinking that it might actually be possible to do that kind of thing with a Möbius strip. I thought of math as a magical subject that could give anyone who was lucky enough to understand its subtleties the power to manipulate space and time and to penetrate the deepest mysteries of the universe. At school, however, I often found those subtleties hard to understand, and, after I almost failed first year calculus at university, I decided I would have to give up on my dream of becoming a mathematician. I did not develop the confidence I needed to return to math at the University of Toronto until I was thirty-three.
In 1995, when I was in the
24Andrew Wiles gave a lecture for one of the Fields Institute programs in the spring of 1995, shortly after his proof of Fermat’ s last theorem. fifth year of my program, the Fields Institute opened on the campus of the university, and I started attending lectures there regularly. It is hard to describe how lucky I felt to have the opportunity to hear some of the greatest minds in mathematics share their thoughts on the very mysteries that I had dreamt of learning about as a child.... I knew that all of these new ideas— that were being discussed with very little fanfare in the lecture hall of the Fields— would not only shape the course of mathematics but would also eventually find applications in nearly every sphere of science and technology. And I knew that most of these applications would be almost unimaginably different from the applications for which the ideas were first conceived.... Over the past twenty years I have had the opportunity to teach math to thousands of children. I have seen many children cheer for math or beg to stay in from recess to do math. I believe that every child is born with the same sense of wonder and curiosity about math that I felt when I was a child. But the majority of people gradually lose their interest in math and even develop a deep aversion to the subject
25The Fields Institute supports many events
bridging mathematics and the arts such as the ArtSci Salon seminar series and the Bridges Lecture series.
because they struggled too much at school.
While I was doing my post-doctoral work at the Fields, I got to know Bradd Hart, who was the Deputy Director of the Institute and who also had a passionate interest in education. I told Bradd about a charity I had recently founded to help students learn math. At the time, JUMP Math was a small tutoring club that I was running in several schools( and my apartment) with a handful of volunteers. Bradd saw the potential of the program and offered to incubate JUMP by giving us free office space and technical support. Since then, JUMP has trained hundreds of parents and teachers at the Fields and has held many talks and conferences on the site. The program now reaches over 150,000 students in Canada and is expanding in the United States, Europe, and South America.
It is hard to imagine what my life would have been like if I had not had the support of the Fields Institute in my research and my charitable work. �
List of contributors
David Andrews James Arthur Edward Bierstone John Chadam Alison Conway Derek G. Corneil Walter Craig Donald Dawson |
Ron Dembo George Elliott Sheila Embleton George Gadanidis John R. Gardner Steve Halperin Ian Hambleton Bradd Hart |
Barbara Lee Keyfitz Peter Lancaster William Langford John Mighton Moshe A. Milevsky Eric Muller Thomas Payne J. Robert Prichard |
Carl Riehm Elaine McKinnon Riehm Tom Salisbury William F. Shadwick Sivabal Sivaloganathan Victor Snaith Mary E. Thompson Matt Valeriote |
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