This interview, with a graduate student in Ukraine, was conducted by Mark Saul on 17 February 2024.\u00a0 It speaks for itself.<\/p>\n
Questions: Let\u2019s start with you.\u00a0 Where did you grow up?\u00a0 Go to School?<\/p>\n
I have always lived in Kyiv.\u00a0 I found my love for mathematics early, and went to\u00a0a special mathematics school here.\u00a0 I then got a master\u2019s degree in mathematics, and am now a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Mathematics at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine here.<\/p>\n
I discovered mathematics as a child, through reading books on extra-curricular mathematics.\u00a0 Games and puzzles.\u00a0 And now one of my jobs is creating such puzzles.\u00a0 The mathematics we studied in school was easy for me.<\/p>\n
I remember my father explaining to me what a fractal was.\u00a0 He did it by asking me what the measurement was of the coastline of Great Britain.\u00a0 The more finely you measure a coastline, the longer it gets.<\/p>\n
In seventh grade, I participated in a team math competition.\u00a0 It\u2019s a contest between two teams.\u00a0 The teams are given a list of questions, and must challenge each other to present solutions.\u00a0 It was my turn to present for my team, up at a blackboard.\u00a0 I had to calculate the length of a diagonal of a rectangle with sides 3 and 4.\u00a0 This may seem too simple to us now, but at the time I didn\u2019t know the Pythagorean Theorem.\u00a0 Nor did my opponents. But I did remember seeing a Youtube video about 3,4,5 triangles.\u00a0 So I was able to present a solution, and became a hero for my team.<\/p>\n
Question: What role has mathematics played in your life?<\/p>\n
Mathematics has always played a central role.\u00a0 It helped me to find a boyfriend, the love of my life.\u00a0 We connected through mathematics.\u00a0 And of course now I make my living doing mathematics.\u00a0 I am working on the development of a Museum of Mathematics here in Kyiv.<\/p>\n
Question: Talk a bit more about this museum.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a big project.\u00a0 We are planning numerous exhibits.\u00a0 I am the main content consultant for the project.\u00a0 It was they who found me, because they knew of my enthusiasm for the subject.<\/p>\n
I now have three jobs.\u00a0 I teach courses for the institute: Calculus, Linear Algebra and Introduction to Mathematics for the Kyiv School of Economics.\u00a0 But my main job is for the Junior Academy of Sciences in Ukraine.\u00a0 This is my work on the museum of mathematics. Also I do a lot of face-to-face work with pre-college students. Mostly in high school.\u00a0 I try to make the work interesting.\u00a0 It\u2019s mostly extra-curricular work, of the sort that first attracted me to mathematics.<\/p>\n
Question: So some of your work now is with school age children growing up in a war-torn country.\u00a0 What role do you think mathematics\u2014or your work in mathematics–plays in their lives?<\/p>\n
Students have to live with the war.\u00a0 For my students, school is not all that interesting.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy for them. My courses help students to not to worry about tragic events in lives.\u00a0 I help them to focus on interesting mathematics instead.\u00a0 And also it helps me.\u00a0 I like to give positive energy to kids, and they return it to me.\u00a0 We help each other.<\/p>\n
I conduct my courses in Zoom.\u00a0 Sometimes there are air raid sirens. We stop the lectures.\u00a0 I tell them to go to shelters.\u00a0 They can\u2019t listen to me while missiles are flying. It\u2019s not much fun.<\/p>\n
I also teach calculus in the Kyiv School of Economics.\u00a0 Lectures are on-site, and we have air raid shelters nearby.\u00a0 It\u2019s actually made somewhat comfortable to teach there, even during an air raid. We just go to our shelter classroom, two floors underground.\u00a0 There are no windows.\u00a0 Only walls, chairs, and a whiteboard.\u00a0 We continue our studies, but it is difficult to concentrate on the mathematics when we know that missiles are flying.\u00a0 We are constantly checking the news to see what is happening.<\/p>\n
I am happy to be in Kyiv, because it\u2019s relatively secure here.\u00a0 It\u2019s a lot harder in other cities.\u00a0 And we have many students here who come from cities which have been destroyed. Some of these students have lost their homes or their families.\u00a0 When air raids begin, they may have panic attacks.\u00a0 We get training in how to stabilize their psychological situation.<\/p>\n
I often meet with my Ph.D. supervisor.\u00a0 We discuss graph theory, but sometimes we stop and think: \u201cWhy are we doing this now?\u00a0 There\u2019s a war going on.\u00a0 Why are we characterizing different sets of vertices while people are fighting for us?\u201d\u00a0 It can get a bit depressing.<\/p>\n
Question: What are some of answers to \u201cWhy are we doing this?\u201d<\/p>\n
We are in our own place, and we make all we can of our situation.\u00a0 Of course we help our soldiers.\u00a0 There\u2019s a big volunteer network in Ukraine.\u00a0 Every tenth person is volunteering for the war effort.\u00a0 We collect money and buy things for our soldiers.\u00a0 We also help support migrants from other towns.\u00a0 We don\u2019t do the fighting, but we do our jobs.\u00a0 We continue our research.\u00a0 And we help our soldiers as much as we can.<\/p>\n
Mathematics calms me down. Why do we do mathematics? At the moment we don\u2019t know why. But maybe someone will use it, eventually.\u00a0 Mathematics is like an art.\u00a0 I feel like I\u2019m painting a picture.\u00a0 This must be yellow, and here must be red and there green.\u00a0 It comes from the heart.\u00a0 Our study appeared out of nowhere.\u00a0 It was one simple problem for a math circle, and we generalized it.<\/p>\n
My mother doesn\u2019t understand why I chose mathematics seven years ago, or what I\u2019m actually doing.\u00a0 What are these mathematical problems?\u00a0 They don\u2019t seem to have any application.\u00a0 Better for you to go to work in a store.<\/p>\n
But I know that I have mathematical intuition.\u00a0 My supervisor saw it and helped me to find my way, to find my topic where I can use my mathematical power.\u00a0 In this way I build a little bit of graph theory with my theorems and propositions.\u00a0 I feel like I\u2019m connected with something great. At the moment we don’t know why are we doing this, but in 200 years someone will use our research. Mathematics is big, big, strong thing, and I’m connected with this big strong thing.<\/p>\n
Question: Do you impart any of these feelings to the kids?<\/p>\n
Well, it\u2019s very much the same thing for kids.\u00a0 The same motivations.\u00a0 These students don\u2019t get enough math in school.\u00a0 They get a little, but they want more.\u00a0 They want to see the whole picture.<\/p>\n
I invite them with words like \u201cYou don\u2019t meet these ideas in school.\u00a0 Here\u2019s something different and interesting in math.\u201d\u00a0 They get internal motivation to learn something new, and they understand that math is not boring and simple.<\/p>\n
I ran a course on mathematical logic two years ago.\u00a0 I had seven students.\u00a0 But I found that people all around Ukraine are interested in mathematics.\u00a0 Now I have more than 100 students in my courses.\u00a0 It makes me happy and proud.\u00a0 I look forward to the feedback at the end of the course, because I know that students enjoy it.\u00a0 They find that mathematics is useful, and also beautiful.<\/p>\n
Question: As a student, did you have exposure to this sort of extra-curricular mathematics?<\/p>\n
My school mathematics teacher \u00a0and his colleagues organized a cultural exchanges with a German \u2018gymnazia\u2019 for talented students.\u00a0 We traveled to Germany, lived there and attended a math camp for a week.\u00a0 Every day we solved problems and learned mathematical topics.\u00a0 We had three such exchanges.\u00a0 They were fascinating.\u00a0 Motivating and eye-opening.<\/p>\n
Question: What do you learn from your students?<\/p>\n
In my course on mathematical logic, I start with set theory.\u00a0 In teaching a certain proposition about sets I asked a student: Why do you think the proposition is true?\u201d\u00a0 One girl gave an interesting answer, using the contrapositive of the statement, which we were not scheduled to discuss for five more days.\u00a0 Students often think differently.\u00a0 I like to give homework which requires them to write out their answers.\u00a0 Not short answer questions.\u00a0 It takes\u00a0a lot of time.\u00a0 But I see how they think and admire their intelligence.<\/p>\n
Doing mathematics in wartime presents its\u00a0own difficulties.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have much support from the government, which is busy prosecuting the war.\u00a0 Sometimes I feel as if I\u2019m playing in the orchestra while the Titanic is sinking.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have opportunities for cultural exchanges.\u00a0 We cannot even travel inside the country.\u00a0 Train schedules are irregular and if there is an air raid there\u2019s no place to hide.\u00a0 So people try not to travel.<\/p>\n
Here in Kyiv we have it good. But on other regions, closer to the border with Russia, they don\u2019t have regular water or electricity.\u00a0 We in the capital are relatively safe from that.<\/p>\n
Mathematics gives me strength.\u00a0 It\u2019s the mainstay of my life.\u00a0 If I didn\u2019t have mathematics, I don\u2019t what I would do.\u00a0 It\u2019s this idea that my world is connected with something great.\u00a0 The war is present now, but mathematics is eternal.\u00a0 The war cannot affect it.\u00a0 We cannot say that Euler was right in 1736, but now he is wrong.<\/p>\n
(At this point in our discussion the electricity went out.\u00a0 Katya and I finished our conversation in the dark.\u00a0 She later sent me a reassuring email message.\u00a0 There were no bombs, and she and her family were safe.\u00a0 The lights came back about an hour after our conversation.)<\/p>\n
AFTERWORD<\/p>\n
In the spring of 2022, I (Mark Saul)\u00a0was working with Tatiana Shubin and other American mathematicians of Ukrainian origin.\u00a0 Hearing of the horrors of war in Ukraine, we decided to do what they could do best to help out\u2014bring mathematics to Ukrainian teachers and students.<\/p>\n
We had been working on a similar program for Native American youth, called the Bluebird Math Circle, and thought that an adaptation of the materials we had been developing might also serve the Ukrainian audience.<\/p>\n
Within a few months, we made contact with the Ukrainian Junior Academy of Sciences, and through them with a number of teachers and educators in Ukraine.\u00a0 We started the Sunflower Bluebird Math Circle, a program for teachers offering unusual or advanced mathematics that the teachers could use with their students.<\/p>\n
The structure was designed to reach as many students as possible.\u00a0 Teachers participated in a Zoom math circle session. Materials for each session were sent to the Ukrainian group in advance and Katia did an excellent job translating everything into Ukrainian. She was also doing synchronic translation at the Zoom meetings to help teachers whose English wasn\u2019t strong enough. After a session, teachers tried out the materials with their students.\u00a0 They created videos and recorded feedback.\u00a0 Two weeks later, they shared their experiences.<\/p>\n
But this description does little to describe the true nature of the program.\u00a0 The circumstances under which teachers work are terrible.\u00a0 Wifi and electricity sometimes fail, and even heating of indoor spaces cannot be relied on.\u00a0 Sometimes teachers tuned in from \u2018warmup centers\u2019, places around Ukraine where people can be warm and have access to wifi. And pretty often some teachers had to log off in order to go to a bomb shelter. It was heart wrenching for us to hear siren wailing and a teacher saying apologetically and calmly, \u201cSorry, there\u2019s an air raid warning, I have to go but will check the rest of the session online when possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite all these hardships, the teachers who attend find energy, enthusiasm, and sheer will power to do the best for their students.\u00a0 What they are doing is far beyond what is expected in their profession.\u00a0 They want to use mathematics to bring joy to the lives of their students, students who otherwise had little joy in their lives these days.<\/p>\n
Teachers tune in from all over Ukraine, from cities, towns and small villages.\u00a0 Some teach in elementary school and others in high school or college.\u00a0 The world has heard about the heroism and bravery of the soldiers in Ukraine, but these teachers are brave heroes in their own right.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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This interview, with a graduate student in Ukraine, was conducted by Mark Saul on 17 February 2024.\u00a0 It speaks for itself. Questions: Let\u2019s start with you.\u00a0 Where did you grow up?\u00a0 Go to School? I have always lived in Kyiv.\u00a0 I found my love for mathematics early, and went to\u00a0aRead More →<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-tkloefkorn","post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331,"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions\/331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathvoices.ams.org\/teachingandlearning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}