Who are the people that make MathILy happen?
Mostly it's students (perhaps you?), but there are also
instructors (former instructors here, and for current instructors see just a bit below).
We are assisted by the members of our Advisory
Amalgam.
The program itself is a project of the nonprofit organization
Mathematical Staircase, Inc. which has a board of directors.
dr. sarah-marie belcastro,
MathILy director and Lead Instructor ()
sarah-marie earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University
of Michigan in 1997 after majoring in mathematics and astronomy at
Haverford College. Among her research areas, she is most
passionate about topological graph theory. sarah-marie has been
faculty at several institutions, ranging from small colleges to
large universities, and she's been a major believer in
discovery-based learning since her teacher training at Michigan.
In addition to teaching at the college level, sarah-marie teaches
enrichment classes at the Art of Problem
Solving. sarah-marie taught as a senior staff member at the
Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics for 11 summers and
co-directed that program for 4 summers. She is the inaugural director of MathILy and has taught there since 2013. She wrote the
introductory textbook Discrete
Mathematics with Ducks, which has much of the same
tone students will find at MathILy.
Dr. Hannah Alpert,
Lead Instructor
Hannah earned her Ph.D. from MIT in 2016 specializing in geometry and is now a math researcher at IDA CCR-La Jolla. She authored/co-authored 6 mathematical research papers before starting graduate school, and has written several problems that have appeared in the AMC 8; her coding strength is writing Python code that writes TikZ code that draws complicated pictures automatically. Hannah has taught at MathPath and at Mathcamp and at the Boston Math Circle and at the first 10 instances of MathILy. She thinks almost everything is too sweet, including limes, but excluding lemons.
Dr. Brian Freidin,
Lead Instructor
Brian earned his Ph.D. from Brown University studying differential geometry and is now a faculty member at the University of San Diego and the Russian School of Mathematics. He did research as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois through the Geometry Lab and the Center for Complex Systems Research. He has taught at the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics and MathILys 2015--2025.
Dr. Thomas Hull, Lead
Instructor
Tom earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1997 and specializes in
the mathematics of origami, which has applications ranging from
solar panels to automobile airbags to self-assembling polymers. He
has earned tenure at one college and one university (so far) and
has used more and more inquiry-based learning in college classes
as he has advanced in his career. Tom taught at the Hampshire
College Summer Studies in Mathematics for 15 summers, and at MathILys 2013--25.
Natasha Ter-Saakov,
Apprentice Instructor
Natasha studied mathematics (and computer science and education) at MIT and is now a graduate student at Rutgers University. She participated in MathILy 2014 and 2015 and MathILy-EST 2019 and was an Apprentice Instructor in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. When she is able to, Natasha enjoys fire spinning. At home, she can be found baking and even occasionally assembling IKEA furniture.
Frank Lu,
Apprentice Instructor
Frank is a graduate student at Harvard University, where he will likely be studying algebraic number theory. Besides math and piano, Frank also enjoys writing and playing games of various types with friends. He attended MathILy in 2018, was the FRANK (Facilitates Rumination, Activating New Knowledge) in 2020, and an Apprentice Instructor 2023--25.
Will Bender,
Apprentice Instructor
Will is a senior math major at Haverford College. He plans to attend grad school at a mysterious, unknown location to pursue a PhD in mathematics. He attended MathILy in 2018, 2019, and 2020. His interests include going down mathematical Wikipedia rabbit holes, board games, Doctor Who, and Pokémon.
Saskia Solotko,
Apprentice Instructor
Biographical information forthcoming!
Kye Shi,
Apprentice Instructor
Kye has been flirting with math for as long as he remembers. In high school, he once wrote a Python script to do his math homework for him (because, geez, how
many more matrices do you want me to invert?). It wasn't until he attended MathILy in 2015 that he realized what math really was about. In 2017, he attended the IPhO in Indonesia and won a gold medal. In 2022, he graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a mathematics and computer science major and is now a graduate student at UCLA, where he uses math as an excuse to write computer programs for fun (or is it the other way around? he doesn't know). These days, Kye's favorite non-nerdy hobbies are percussion, ballroom dancing, and West Coast swing dancing. He was an MathILy Apprentice Instructor in 2020, 2021, and 2022 and a MathILy-Er Apprentice Instructor in 2024.
Caroline Cashman,
PRiME FACToR (Protector and Responder in the MathILy Environment, Facilitator of Academics and CriTiquer of wRiting)
Caroline is a senior at the College of William & Mary and plans to attend graduate school next fall where she hopes to keep studying graph theory. Her hobbies include knitting, playing piano, rock climbing, and running. She especially enjoys when she can make cool mathematical shapes out of her running routes. She has yet to make any cool mathematical shapes out of her climbing routes but once she learns how to levitate she will give it another try.
MathILy, MathILy-Er, and MathILy-EST are projects of the nonprofit organization Mathematical Staircase, Inc..