Sanjoy Mahajan
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Topic of Talk: Street-fighting mathematics and science: The art of opportunistic problem solving.
Abstract: With traditional science and mathematics teaching, students struggle with fundamental concepts. For example, they cannot reason with graphs and have little feel for physical magnitudes. With such handicaps in intuition and reasoning, students can learn only by rote.
He will describe these difficulties using mathematical, physical, and engineering examples. Then he will discuss how street-fighting mathematics and science---the art of approximation---can improve our teaching and thinking, the better to handle the complexity of the world. |
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About the Speaker: Sanjoy Mahajan is Associate Professor of Applied Science and Engineering at Olin College of Engineering. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1998, and has undergraduate degrees in physics from Stanford University and in mathematics from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Due to his wonderful teachers, he became interested in improving science teaching, an interest he followed as a postdoctoral researcher and faculty member in the Physics Department at the University of Cambridge and as a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
While at Cambridge, he helped found the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was the first Curriculum Director and taught the first courses in physics and computer science. There he wrote the free software to automate barcoding and cataloguing the 5000 donated books that started the Institute's library.
While at MIT, he taught in the mathematics, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering departments. His book “Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving”, which grew out of his mathematics teaching, was published in March 2010 by MIT Press. It is available in print and online under a Creative Commons Noncommercial ShareAlike license.
