Math Education of Sesame Street – National Museum of Mathematics (2024)

Julia Schanan’s entry for the Strogatz Prize was a free-verse poem titled “Math Person.” The judges were moved by the poem’s artistry and emotional power, its depth and raw honesty, its brilliant use of language, and its eye for the unexpected but telling detail. “Math Person” conveys – in ways both beautiful and haunting – the isolation Julia felt as one of the only girls in the American Math Competition 10th grade and, more profoundly, the intellectual isolation she still feels every day as someone who loves math deeply yet lacks a friend with whom to share it.

Mom offers to stop by Panera as a treat for all the painful math that I’ve just endured.

Except it wasn’t painful.

I’m someone who sat through the slow-drip of middle school math, bored and daydreaming,

not seeing what it was all for, wishing – but never working up the guts to push – for more.

Not until now.

Now, I don’t want Panera.

I don’t want to be patted on the shoulder and misunderstood.

I want to go back into that auditorium and finish the exam and talk about it all night.

The judges felt that their own words were inadequate to summarize Julia’s achievement in writing “Math Person.” Let us simply say, read her poem and experience it for yourself.

Click here to read Julia’s poems.

Apoorva Panidapu is a 16-year-old mathematics student, artist, and advocate for youth and gender minorities in STEAM. She writes a blog called “Gems in STEM” and frequently posts the essays on Cantor’s Paradise, the #1 math site on Medium.com. She sees her blog as “a place to learn about math topics in an accessible, light-hearted manner. I assume no more than basic math knowledge and include fun tidbits for learners of all experience levels. For both my own fun and for readers, I weave in pop culture, pick-up lines, and over-the-top stories to let people into the fantastical world of math, and to show them that anyone can enjoy anything.”

The judges were very impressed with Apoorva’s joyful, elegantly written blog posts on a wide range of math topics, from the liar’s paradox and partitions to tessellations and fractals. Combining clear explanations with an appealing layout and well-chosen graphics, Gems in STEM is itself a gem. The judging panel loved the wide range of Apoorva’s blog posts. They touch on history, etymology, and puzzles, and make connections to everything from art and architecture to science and nature. Apoorva’s uplifting message is that math is everywhere and approachable by anyone from any background.

Click here to read Apoorva’s posts.

Coronado, CA

The project submitted by Kyna Airriess is a “zine” based on a quote from A Mathematician’s Lament, a polemical essay by high school teacher Paul Lockhart. “There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics,” wrote Lockhart. Reading Lockhart’s essay, says Kyna, “contributed to my own conversion from ardent math-hater to aspiring mathematician; I’d never heard someone describe math, the subject of unfeeling calculations, with words like ‘poetic’ and ‘radical.’ It was a long time before I began to see these traits for myself, but today I self-identify as a math nerd, and I want to study math in college.”

In the zine, each of Lockhart’s memorable adjectives—dreamy, poetic, subversive, and psychedelic—is illustrated and connected to math ideas, using symbols, history, color, and imagery. The judges were impressed by the passionate energy conveyed by the zine’s words and design. The overall effect achieves what Kyna intended: to embody “what those of us who love math want the world to understand. It isn’t about cold calculations at all— it’s a field full of creativity and beauty, and it is just as infused with humanity as any other.”