Outreach

Cambridge Math Circle

I create content and volunteer with the Cambridge Math Circle. For example, I created this worksheet on Olympic climbing to explain the subtle mathematical oddities of voting (called social choice theory).

The task is to draw a house tracing by every line exactly once.

Primary school math club

I volunteered at a math club in an East London primary school. The club was created by Imperial College math professor Richard Thomas and London School of Economincs professor Balazs Szentes and it has an intriguing format:

(1) Each student is given a different problem, eliminating the hasty work created from competition.

(2) The problem is tailored to their level and designed to make the student think deeply.

(3) The volunteers employ the Socratic method, only asking leading questions and verifying correct reasoning.

Math Club Book

Recently, we assembled nearly 100 problems into a workbook, and added hints, and solutions. We are in the process of contacting publishers.

Here are some sample questions:

Snakes and Ladders:

Harry cheats at snakes and ladders.

On each move, he turns the dice to the number that gets him furthest up the board. So on his first move, he throws a 3 (so he can go up the ladder to 20).

How many moves does he need to win?

Follow up: if you cheat too, can you beat Harry if he goes first?

Pinocchio:

Pinocchio lies on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and tells the truth on other days.

Pinocchio tells you “Today is Saturday. And tomorrow will be Wednesday”.

What day is it? How do you know?

Follow-up: Pinocchio's nose grows after he tells a lie (but does nothing when he tells the truth).

He says “My nose will grow when I finish this sentence.”

What happens?

Running Laps:

Three friends enjoy running on the track, each at a consistent pace.

Ali runs a lap every two minutes.

Blake runs a lap every three minutes.

Chloé runs a lap every five minutes.

They all begin at the start line at 12:00.

What time is this photo is taken?

Prison Math Project

Christopher Havens began studying mathematics while in solitary confinement and soon discovered a passion that sparked a personal transformation. The Prison Mathematics Project is Christopher's vision to emulate his positive experience with math across prisons in the United States.

The project pairs mentors with prisoners eager to learn math. After some difficulty getting textbooks approved in prisons, volunteers began creating curriculum ideal for self-study. In 2023, I led a team designing an introductory graph theory course. A preliminary version of the first 6 chapters is available here. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

The left figure is an aerial view of a room with blue walls. How many lightbulbs are needed to illuminate it? One approach is to divide the room into triangles and then assign a color (red, green, purple) to each corner of each triangle so that every triangle has all three colors. Placing a lightbulb at each red corner, 8 in total, lights up the entire room. Can you light up the room with fewer than 8 lightbulbs?

Additional initiatives

In August 2023, I gave a lecture series in Kampala, Uganda as part of a workshop organized by the Eastern Africa Algebra Research Group (EAALG).

Here are introductory notes on modular arithmetic written for advanced high school students at the Toronto Math Circle.

Here are notes on area (including scissors-congruence and calculus) written for high school students for Imperial's STEM potential.

I co-taught a course on voting theory and the mathematics of elections designed by Angela Wu with London Maths Outreach.

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