Math olympiad coach says to treat it as a creative subject

For the first time in 21 years, American teens won the International Mathematical Olympiad. The six-member, all-male team was coached by Carnegie Mellon University professor Po-Shen Loh, who said Americans can compete on the national stage – and in their careers – if teachers and students start tackling math like the subject is part of humanities studies.
“It would be beneficial to start portraying math as a creative subject. Math is a cross between art and law. The law part represents logical arguments, the proofs and all the quantitative and analytical components. The art is calculating the solution to any problem with as simple a formula as possible. It almost results in poetry in trying to make something so analytical so elegant,” Loh said.
Loh wants to set up all students for success by making the study of all subjects interactive and custom-tailored to a student’s learning style. So, Loh created a website, expii.com, which is a free and collaborative learning tool.
“We need to encourage active learning by making learning interactive and engaging,” Loh said, “and the way the site does this is, you’re interacting with your own study. If you answer a question incorrectly, it prompts you with an explanation and asks you to answer again. And there are multiple explanations to a problem. A calculus class gives you one book, one way to understand a model or problem. This site allows you to investigate multiple ways to understand and solve problems.”
The site isn’t limited solely to mathematics, and includes astronomy and physics, among other subjects. But one of the most important lessons available on the site, according to Loh, is number theory.
“Number theory – dealing with prime numbers – their study is so important to so many areas of engineering and computation, but specifically cyber security,” he said.
“A phone call, the websites you look at – they’re all encrypted in some way. … To fully understand the abilities of patterns (in these encryptions) you need to understand number theory. They will help you use the patterns as building blocks, and use them to build up virtual architecture from solid houses to masterful cathedrals,” he said.
In South Fayette, high school mathematics department chairwoman Maureen Sirc said teachers need to start acknowledging the usual cynicism of students: “How am I ever going to use this?”
“That is actually a module in our algebra classes all the way up to calculus, ‘How Will I Ever Use This?’ which assigns students an open-ended subject to research,” she said.
The result? Last year, 69 out of 70 students passed their advanced-placement course exams, and one student who studied problems in differential equations went on to win a competitive engineering internship through Duquesne University – the only freshman student out of 60 winners, among 500 applicants. The open-ended approach results in better students and attractive potential hires, Sirc said.
“Math majors can do things other than teach or be an engineer. We need math people to be more than programmers, and that’s what we’re hearing from companies like Google. They need math people to make predictions about problems that they don’t have yet, not just program to solve existing problems,” she said.
“So there has to be a change for teachers, too. Because with this open-ended module, the teacher doesn’t know the problem or the answer. We need math teachers who are willing to say to students, ‘I don’t know. Let’s solve this together.’ That’s a very scary thing, but just like number theory, we need people to do more than work through prescribed algorithms. Employers want math experts who can find their own problems and provide the solution,” she said.
The Olympiad competition, like the Olympics, Loh said, is an unrealistic goal for everyone to attain, but its existence is a dream on the horizon for students – just like athletes – to strive toward.
“Approaching the Olympiad as a coach, I’m not out there to win. I’m there to inspire these top students to have as much impact on the country as possible. What can be achieved through your life is the real goal. The Olympiad is just a way to show students they can do it,” he said.
A big problem, he said, and why he created the Expii platform, is in the face of “gimmicky” learning aids and visual novelty, there’s a need for genuinely interactive platforms that do more than entertain.
“Making learning dynamic makes the subject material easier to retain, but it needs to legitimately engage a student. … A student has nearly limitless choice in free resources in today’s classrooms, but they need to stay motivated. With these resources, it’s not whether they have access, it’s whether they want to do the work or not,” he said.
Loh said any student who’s interested in taking the tests to qualify for the International Mathematical Olympiad should contact his or her math teacher, or reach the Mathematical Association of America.