I'm Oscar E. Fernandez, a professor of mathematics at Wellesley College. I joined the college in 2011 and from 2018-2021 served as the Faculty Director of our Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center.
Contact Information:
Department of Mathematics
Wellesley College
(781) 283-3164
ofernand@wellesley.edu
I’m an applied mathematician by training—I earned my Ph.D. in Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 2009—and that means I’m very interested in the applications of math to other subjects, like physics and economics. I see the world through a math lens and can’t help but notice the hidden math behind just about everything. (I often tweet about this on Twitter (@EverydayCalc).) My books, Everyday Calculus and The Calculus of Happiness (both with Princeton University Press), both explore the hidden math all around us. Calculus Simplified and Calculus 2 Simplified (also with Princeton) adds exposure to the mathematics of calculus and the many applications of the subject to the social, life, and physical sciences.
I grew up in Miami, Florida. My parents are Cuban immigrants and my first language is Spanish. (Beaches and Cuban food, music, and culture are therefore in my DNA.) I am also a first-generation college graduate. The most recent addition to my identity is that of father -- I have two energetic and curious little girls. These parts of my identity continue to shape who I am and inspire everything from my writing to my teaching to my scholarship.
I believe strongly that every person can learn (and do) mathematics. Despite the abstract and inaccessible field mathematics is often perceived as, we are all mathematicians at heart. We are all pattern seekers (think about the clothes you wear most often; I bet you’ll spot a pattern) and finding patterns is at the heart of mathematics.
What I’ve just done is to deploy the first of the three main approaches I use to help teach mathematics:
Reveal the hidden mathematics behind everyday events and activities.
Create opportunities to interact with mathematics.
Simplify the teaching of mathematics.
Once you realize that mathematics is all around you, including in the everyday things and events you experience, the subject becomes much less abstract, much more accessible, and much more personally relevant. This was the approach I took in my first two books, Everyday Calculus and The Calculus of Happiness. Everyday Calculus focuses on revealing the hidden calculus behind everyday events and activities (e.g., making breakfast); The Calculus of Happiness focuses on uncovering the mathematics behind health, personal finance, and love. As these books show, math is not only relevant and accessible, but empowering too.
Because a central theme of my writing is to reveal the hidden mathematics all around you, I often create interactive applets and figures intended to help you engage directly with mathematics and not just observe it or be made aware of its presence. Creating these opportunities to interact with mathematics is my second main approach to teaching math. I’ve created a growing list of interactive math applets that help you engage with mathematics and illustrate some of the concepts and applications I discuss in my writing. The list of applets is archived on the Interactive Math Applets page.
The final approach I use in my quest to help every person learn and enjoy math is to simplify its teaching. We don’t need thousand-page tomes to learn calculus, for example. In fact, the essence of calculus can be described in just 7 pages. That’s what I did in the first chapter of Calculus Simplified (you can download that chapter for free on the site), which teaches the first semester in a college-level calculus course in about 100 pages without any prior knowledge of trigonometric, logarithmic, or exponential functions. It does this by distilling the subject to its essence, giving the reader choices about what content they’d like to learn, and keeping the exposition concise. I do something similar in Calculus 2 Simplified, where I give the reader the option to learn Calculus 2 via a "sequences first" approach, which requires far fewer prerequisites to start compared to the standard approach (which requires knowledge of integration right away).
Beyond the books I have written, check out the Math Articles page to read my other writing, including my articles on The Huffington Post.
In addition to writing about math, I also do research in math. My main research areas are mathematical physics and mathematical demography. In the former I study physical systems that roll—like cars and bowling balls—and try to describe their dynamics using a variety of results from different subfields of math. Within mathematical demography I study how we measure inequality and what implications that has for a species' future demographic characteristics (e.g., life span). You can read more about my research on the Research & Scholarship page, where you’ll also find a list of my research publications. You can also download my CV here.
I hope you enjoy this site. If you find any errors or would like to leave other feedback, feel free to email me (ofernand@wellesley.edu).
