Email: Drake.Olejniczak@gmail.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/drake-olejniczak
GitHub: https://github.com/Doogan1
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drakeolejniczak2357
WordPress Blog: https://drakeomath.wordpress.com/
For an overview of what can be found here, with links to where you can find them, take a look at the list below.
If you're interested in reading about my accomplishments and experiences, please navigate over to my CV page.
If you're curious about my research, or you'd like some of the algorithm output data I've generated for research, please take a look at my research page.
If you'd like to know more about my teaching philosophy, see some sample material/worksheets I've prepared for my classes, or access my growing library of educational video content, head on over to my teaching page.
If you're bored or want to know more about some of my personal interests, check out my amusement page.
I hope you enjoy your stay here!
Developed an interactive network visualizer for the Comedy Bang Bang podcast series using Django, React, and D3.js. This tool allows users to explore relationships between characters and guests through dynamic visualizations and intuitive controls, enhancing their understanding of complex network structures.
The project is now deployed! I'm using PythonAnywhere for the backend and GitHub pages for the front end. Check it out here!
Created an educational visualization tool to illustrate the Preferential Attachment model of network growth using JavaScript and D3.js. This interactive tool enables users to explore how new nodes connect to existing nodes, demonstrating key concepts in network theory and complex system dynamics.
Developed a visualization tool for demonstrating concepts in graph theory and combinatorics, specifically focusing on Down-arrow Ramsey Sets. Utilizing Python and NetworkX, this tool provides dynamic visualizations to enhance understanding of structural properties and relationships within complex graphs.
I grew up in a small town in Southern Michigan, graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from Northern Michigan University in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula, and earned my Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. My doctoral thesis is titled "Variations in Ramsey Theory" and was supervised by Professor Ping Zhang.
After earning my Ph.D. in 2019, I began working for Purdue University Fort Wayne's Department of Mathematical Sciences in a visiting position. I earned my tenure-track role after a year and spent the next three years working toward tenure by building up my teaching and research portfolios. At the same time, I was living in two different places as I spent weekends in Ohio with my wife near the university where she taught.
This was a challenging arrangement, and budget issues at both of our schools prevented a solution to the two-body problem. So, in Spring 2023, I chose our relationship over my career by moving to New York with my wife where she had found a new position.
I continued working with Purdue Fort Wayne in a temporary capacity while I developed a new course, "Intro to Network Science," and taught it in Fall 2023. During that time, I began exploring career possibilities outside of academia. I eventually decided to pursue positions where I could develop my programming skills, since I had always enjoyed coding and used it regularly in my mathematics research.
For the past couple months I have been developing my software development skills and knowledge, learning how to apply machine learning methods in TensorFlow, and working on some projects to build a portfolio.
So far, I've earned the following certificates with freeCodeCamp:
Recently, I've been working on developing my own projects to hone my skills and learn some frameworks - you can read more about these projects above.
I write educational content that focuses on engaging the reader through scaffolded problems, applications to real-world problems, and interesting mathematical content - you can find many examples of these activities in the various courses I have taught on my teaching page. The article "Ramsey's Realm," available on my WordPress blog, is written for the general audience rather than students in a specific course. I hope you find it entertaining and informative as it opens a window into Ramsey theory, the subject of my doctoral thesis. Through articles like this one, I hope to share intriguing philosophical insights that can be gained from "higher mathematics." In this case, there are limits to chaos - some structures are unavoidable and order is guaranteed to appear.
I have taught courses at Western Michigan University (WMU) as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and at Purdue University Fort Wayne (PFW) as an Assistant Professor of Discrete Mathematics. My passion for mathematics education came to me at WMU, in part, through my role as an instructor in the Developmental Mathematics Program. Kirsty Eisenhart directed this program and worked closely with myself and other teaching assistants to instill an active learning pedagogy in these courses. By creating engaging in-class activities, we hoped to repair our students' relationship with mathematics and show them that they are capable of success in a mathematics course. As an instructor in Pre-Algebra and Algebra I, I learned to rely less on a pre-rehearsed lecture and instead react to my students' responses to open-ended questions, lead discussions based on their participation in activities, and drive student-student interaction by guiding discussions. I never found this easy or comfortable, but it is incredibly rewarding when successful, while less successful attempts are rewarding as they provide opportunities for my own growth as a classroom leader. Beyond developmental mathematics, these techniques have borne fruit in each of my courses. Most notably, I find this active learning pedagogy successful in my graduate level Graph Theory course at PFW. Learning math is learning math - whether you are approaching algebra for the tenth time or encountering higher level concepts like vertex-transitive graphs, Lagrange multipliers, or the Principle of Mathematical Induction.
My primary focus is on the user experience, i.e., those learning from my instruction and content. Since these users learn in diverse ways, I must continually develop approaches that may capture their attention. While engaging my students through actively participating in mathematics is the goal, some students appreciate a good instructional video. You can find video content on my YouTube channel that accompanies the learning activities and material in my courses. One of my passions is video production. While I am not satisfied with my current level of video production - there are many ideas I will find the time to enact in the future. To push the analogy, this arm is still curling only 5 pound weights. However, I am grateful to my past self for publishing these videos on YouTube so that anyone can view them (if they manage to find them) rather than just on university hosted video platforms like Kaltura that only my students can view.
The following papers are either published or accepted in peer-reviewed journals:
1. Counting the number of round-robin tournament schedules (with A. Cherry and Q. Zhang). Elemente Der Mathematik. 71 (2016) 21-38.
2. Changing views of Ramsey numbers (with P. Zhang). Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. 102 (2017) 159-180.
3. Proper Ramsey numbers of graphs (with S. English, D. Johnston and P. Zhang). Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. 101 (2017) 281-299.
4. On s-bipartite Ramsey numbers of paths (with Z. Bi and P. Zhang). Congressus Numerantium. 228 (2017) 5-16.
5. Trees and Hamiltonicity (with A. Byers, G. Chartrand and P. Zhang). Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. 104 (2018) 187-204.
6. On the s-bipartite Ramsey numbers of graphs K2,3 and K3,3 (with Z. Bi and P. Zhang). Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. 106 (2018) 257-272.
7. The s-bipartite Ramsey numbers of the graph K2,3 (with Z. Bi and P. Zhang).
Ars Combinatoria. 142 (2019) 283-291.
8. Planar 3-path graphs (with A. Byers, M. Zayed and P. Zhang). Ars Combinatoria. 149 (2020) 279-297.
9. Uniformly Connected Graphs (with G. Chartrand and P. Zhang). Ars Combinatoria (2018).
10. Spanning trees and Hamiltonicity (with A. Byers, M. Zayed and P. Zhang). Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. 110 (2019) 61-71.
11. Hamiltonian-connected graphs with additional properties (with N. Almohanna and P. Zhang.) Congressus Numerantium. 231 (2018) 291-302.
12. The Down-Arrow Ramsey Set of a Graph (with A. Byers). Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing. 117 (2022) pg.2, 1-21.
13. Changing the Uniform Spectrum by Deleting Edges (with R. Vandell.) Proceedings in Mathematics and Statistics (2024)
