An Interview With Richard Rusczyk

I had the chance to interview Richard Ruscyzk, the founder of AoPS, an after-school math program wildly popular among mathletes, and author/co-author of the bestselling Art of Problem Solving textbook series, about all things AoPS and math-related. Enjoy!

Q: Why did you start AoPS?

A: We started this, or I started this, because I wanted to build the sorts of things I wished I’d had when I was a student. I really loved math when I was in middle school and in high school. I went to high school in northern Alabama in the eighties. There weren’t many books; there was no internet. My school was not particularly competitive in mathematics, so I had to learn a lot of things on my own. When I went to college, I found that all of my college classes were a lot easier because of all of the challenges that I’d been confronted with in math competitions. I realized I had a huge advantage over other students in college who had not had those same experiences. I also realized there was no reason for students to have to wait until math competitions to be confronted with these challenges. These problems had taught me so much that I decided a math curriculum should be built around these sorts of challenges. So that’s ultimately what led my co-author and I, Sandor Lehozcky, to write the first pair of books during college. 

We wrote those two books for math competition students so they could learn some of that math a little faster, and then ten years later we started this company. We started this company to build an online school and an online community. I had tried to teach high school, right after college, and it was too hard. I expected all the students to be excited about math, and they were not. A lot of students by high school have already given up on learning, given up on math, and I couldn’t reach those students. But for the students who really loved math still and still loved learning, I could reach them. By building an online school, I could bring those students together, those students who loved math as much as I did and loved math as much as each other. And I could bring them together and let those students know that they’re not alone, that there are other people like them. Because there are a lot of middle school students and even high school students who don’t realize that if you love math or programming or anything in the sciences, you are probably going to spend the rest of your life in spaces surrounded by people like that. There are lots of those people out there; it’s not obvious in middle school. But these skills and interests, they’re really really valuable, and these people get together and build amazing things. That’s not obvious when you’re thirteen. So, when you bring all these people together and you start to realize there’s a lot of people who like the same things that you do, that’s really powerful. So that’s why we started AoPS.

Q: What was it like, starting out?

A: We started this just working a couple days a week in a spare bedroom, just doing a little bit at a time, and then when we started the company, we hired one person, a year later, hired another person, and another person. It was slow; we built things very carefully, very gradually, rather than doing things very fast and having them not be very good. We were early. It was 2003, it was before Facebook, so we were the first place for some of these students to come together and talk to each other. And that was a huge benefit, getting into the space before there was anything else. 

Q: What have been some of the most gratifying moments in your career?

A: Oh, there’s been tons and tons and tons of them. In the early years, going to National MATHCOUNTS - I mean, going to National MATHCOUNTS is always fun - but in the early years, going to National MATHCOUNTS and actually meeting the students that I was working with online, and seeing how important the work was that we were doing, for them, that was really gratifying. As time has gone by, there’s been more and more and more of students, and that’s really fantastic, and now going to the campuses and getting to meet all of the students who have been such a rich part of the campus culture, like that’s still extremely gratifying, to see all of these people who are going to build the world in the future coming together to prepare to build the world, that’s really gratifying. It’s also very gratifying to see my teammates here at AoPS, and to see some of them come here straight out of college, and y’know, they don’t know what they want to be, they don’t know what they want to do, but they do know they want to serve this mission, and to see their careers and they skills and their interests, develop while they’re here, that’s very gratifying. I don’t get to teach much anymore, but I still get to see that same kind of human flourishing and human growth on the team. 

Q: Connecting to the previous response, what are some ways you are trying to bridge the gaps in mathematics for underserved students (i.e., students from low-income families)?

A: So one of the big ways is we have a Pathways program. So this is a scholarships program, and we have partners that help us find students. We're partnering with an organization. It's called National Math stars. The National Math stars identifies students as having high interest and high potential in mathematics, but maybe they don't have the financial wherewithal, or their parents don't know the right people to talk to or don’t know what programs to sign up for. They support these students with $100,000 through all of their schooling to do things like AoPS or summer programs or that sort of thing. I also created a nonprofit called AoPS initiative. It runs a program called BEAM, or Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, and it runs summer programs right now in New York and Los Angeles. There's a non-residential program for students finishing sixth grade and a residential program for students who are finishing seventh. These are students in very underserved communities who are very interested in math - they're just as interested in math as the students we work with at AoPS, but they haven't had access to any resources until they get to BEAM, so they're several years behind where AoPS students tend to be. So we’re working with several hundred students in each city to try to bridge that gap. We're also starting a national program, probably in the coming years, looking to expand to more cities. So that's another way we address access issues. 

Q: Pivoting a bit, what’s your textbook writing process like?

A: The writing process is basically just: writing is rewriting. You finish the first draft and, oh, you're about 10% the process. It starts with an outline. Now you'll change as you go through, but you start with a pretty thorough outline, understanding what are the subjects we want to teach, in what order. What are the dependencies? Okay, I need these two subjects before I teach that subject. So I lay out the subjects, and then I go through and pick the problems that are going to teach the concepts that I want to teach. And when I'm picking the problems, sometimes that will cause me to have to reorder some things, because I'll realize, oh, this subject that I was going to do after this one, no, I need to do them in the other order, and I need to simplify this. And then I'll be able to hit more subtle points when we come back to this one concept down here. So the problems are the story. With these problems, I'm trying to tell a narrative of mathematics. Each one's leading to the next, leading to the next. Problems are really important. So I'll try to pick out the most interesting, most challenging, or maybe not the most challenging, but the most illuminating problems, and then build a scaffold up to those problems with simpler problems behind them. Some of them come from competitions, because competitions have some really, really strong problems like that. See, you can take those thought processes you're using to solve these hard math problems, and you can apply them in physics. You can apply them in economics, computer science, engineering, whatever philosophy. So they transfer really well, and that's also what we're thinking about when we develop the books. Anyways, I hand what I’ve written over to Dave Patrick, and Dave puts more red on the page than there was black on the page, and hands it back to me, and says, “It's not good enough.” And then I have to write it again. And we do this two or three times, and there are other editors, too. Dave was easily the best of them, but there are a few other good editors that we have. If you're ever going to write, my advice is that the editing is where the writing becomes great. And if you don't have a good editor, you're in trouble, and you need an editor that you'll listen to. If you have somebody who you handed your paper to and they cover it with red, and you're like, “This is all wrong. I'm ignoring it,” you either need to find a different editor, or you need to approach it differently. You need somebody who's going to tell you stuff isn't good enough because the first draft is never good enough. 

Q: What’s your advice for students interested in math? What should they try, other than math competitions?

A: Take math and try to tie it to whatever else they enjoy. I once had a woman explain this to me: I was at a math conference somewhere, a teacher's conference, and she made the comment, if you take math and tie it to anything you're interested in, you can build a career. And I think that's basically true of anything that you're going to be in - it doesn't even have to be math adjacent. If you have an interest in math, if you've developed some skills and interests in math, you're going to get a huge advantage over the people who don't. I mean, it's essential, and you might not know it from looking at the outside. Take architecture, for example. I was once at a middle school, and I was giving a talk to all the students, and the principal got up and and said, I wanted to be an architect, but then I got to college, and I couldn't do calculus, so I couldn't be I couldn't be an architect, and I'm like, wow, I couldn't have stood up and given a better speech for why you need to learn math. This guy was describing a career he really wanted to pursue, but he just hadn't developed the math underpinnings that he would need to get through whatever the prerequisites were to get to that career. And I think that's going to be true for a lot of careers, in some non-obvious ways, for things to do other than competitions.

And that’s all! I hope you enjoyed Mr. Rusczyk’s enlightening interview - and if you’re feeling inspired enough to go do some math, maybe it’s time for you to stop procrastinating by reading the Leo and actually get your LME done? Just kidding. Though if you’re looking for more math, the Opinions section has some great math-related articles, while Humor and Arts has some fun puzzles!