Outreach
Primary school math club
I volunteer at a math club in an East London primary school with two-thirds of students ethnic minorities. The club was created by Imperial 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.
Sample questions
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 turns does he need to get to 100?
Follow up: if you cheat too, can you beat Harry if he goes first?
Triplets Alice, Bob, and Cody each got toy cars for their birthday. Each of them makes a track to race the cars down a hill. Who will win the race?
Follow up: Can you design a track to win the race?
Place 5 counters in a line.
You and a partner take turns removing 1 or 2 counters each go.
The person who takes the last counter wins.
After you’ve played a few times, can you work out a strategy to always win?
Follow up: what if there were 10 counters? 99 counters?
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. I am leading 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.