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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