University of Wisconsin-Madison math professor Jordan Ellenberg eats pizza weekly with other Discovery Fellows and department professors, stimulating discussion about new topics in science.
Most recently, Ellenberg has taken an interest in artificial intelligence and spent time working on a project with Google Deepmind to brainstorm different uses for the tool in the mathematical discipline.
“They had a very wonderful idea of using a large language model to generate chunks of code that are supposed to sort of help you with a certain mathematical problem,” Ellenberg told The Daily Cardinal. “It's pretty fun to read codes in a machine mode and try to learn stuff.”
After graduating with a Ph.D. in math from Harvard University in 1998, Ellenberg took a position as a postdoctoral student at the Simon Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute. He taught at Princeton University for eight years before becoming an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison, where he remains a professor today.
Ellenberg’s research background in number theory, geometry
Ellenberg primarily studies number theory and algebraic geometry, both areas within the greater field of pure mathematics.
He now holds the positions of John D. MacArthur Professor and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the UW-Madison, as well as of a Cornell A.D. White Professor at Large. The John D. MacArthur professorship recognizes distinguished scholars in research, the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professorship recognizes exceptional scholarship as well as teaching and service and the Cornell A.D. White Professorship is considered one of the most prestigious distinctions in an academic’s career.
“A lot of my research is in very traditional, very classical areas of number theory… It's sort of saying, here's an equation. Does it have solutions? Can you find whole numbers that solve it?” Ellenberg said. “That's a very, very old kind of question. We still basically don't know anything about it. I mean, we had a few thousand years to work on it, and we're making some progress.”
For Ellenberg, teaching is a way to tell stories about math.
“Every single thing we use was invented by some person, for some reason, for some problem they were trying to do. I find it really useful to bring that into the classroom,” Ellenberg said.
Ellenberg has also published three books, including a novel called “The Grasshopper King.” His books “How Not to Be Wrong” and “Shape” combine statistical data and mathematics with storytelling techniques. Ellenberg also writes a blog, called Quomodocumque.
“I have a long-term goal of trying to figure out how to teach and how to talk about this process of writing about science, writing about math. A lot of people do it, and there's clearly a demand, but hardly anyone's trained in it. There's no process to writing about data,” Ellenberg said.
Among other classes, Ellenberg teaches a first-year interest group called “Writing and Data,” which focuses on teaching students to synthesize data into news and scientific writing. By the end of the first-year interest group, students are expected to create a magazine-style piece. His goal: talk to and support non-scientists.
“There’s a way that you learn in high school to write an academic paper, and, in your classes here, when you write, there's a certain academic style…but that's not really the way we explain stuff to the general public. And for scientists who are working, there's a way to write a journal article, but it's also its own separate style,” he said.
‘The students here are really eager to learn’
Ellenberg shared his thoughts on one of the more controversial areas of math curriculum education: the Common Core, a set of standards for English and mathematics education for kindergarten through high school students. Ellenberg, an advocate of the curriculum, has written extensively on the Common Core and K-12 education in periodicals like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
“I basically think it's like a very solid set of goals. It's pretty ambitious, and it sets pretty high standards,” Ellenberg said. “One thing that it really centers, and I think is very right, is that the ability to do arithmetic manipulations and then form algebraic manipulations is absolutely critical, and kids have to not just sort of know how to do those things, but really master those things.”
Ellenberg also shared his opinion on online mathematics education — a format that had many downsides, but some surprising innovations, he said. While the general format led to a lack of student attention, he said, the chat sidebar allowed for more student participation throughout lectures, letting students offer input without interrupting the teacher or the flow of the classroom.
Ellenberg looks forward to beginning the new semester, where he will be teaching “Writing and Data,” a seminar in number theory, and a section of a course called “Reading and Research.”
“This is a really fun place to teach. The students here are really eager to learn, and it's just always a fun classroom,” Ellenberg said.
