Who are the people that make MathILy-Er happen?
Mostly it's students (perhaps you?), but there are also
instructors (see 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. Corrine Yap, MathILy-Er director and Lead Instructor ()
Corrine earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2023 and is about to start as faculty at Mount Holyoke College. Her research interests include extremal and probabilistic combinatorics and statistical physics. In her "spare time" she travels to math departments around the country to perform her one-woman play Uniform Convergence, which she began writing when she was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College studying mathematics and theater. She currently holds the record of "most titles held in the {MathILy, MathILy-Er} organization" (PRiME in 2014--15, Apprentice Instructor 2015-22, Lead Instructor 2023, Director-Er 2024+).
Dr. Alice Mark,
Lead Instructor
Alice is the Barbara Burnett Director of Undergraduate Mathematics Education at Vanderbilt University. Her main mathematical interest is group theory, and her favorite kind of groups are reflection groups. She has assisted in several inquiry-based learning college classes, has presented at the Austin Math Circle, has worked with the University of Chicago Young Scholars Program, and was an Apprentice Instructor at MathILy-Er 2015 as well as a Lead Instructor at MathILy-Ers 2016--2024 (and at MathILy 2025) and the Director of MathILy-Ers 2019--2023.
Noa Hunter, Apprentice Instructor
Noa is a mathematics PhD student at University of Notre Dame. They are primarily interested in algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, and related fields. They are a vegetarian and a personality test enthusiast, and their hobbies include tennis, card games (Canasta and Euchre are favorites), and embroidery. Currently, they are working on learning Spanish and getting past level 4 on the arcade game Mappy.
Lixin Zheng,
Apprentice Instructor
Lixin is a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Before that, he studied math at Georgia Tech, roaming the same haunted halls of the math building as Corrine. He is interested in number theory, group theory, and anything algebra-related (including combinatorial games, apparently). Outside of math, Lixin plays a lot of card games like bridge, speedruns video games, plays a double-reed instrument often confused with the oboe, and reads fantasy novels.
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 a MathILy Apprentice Instructor in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
MathILy, MathILy-Er, and MathILy-EST are projects of the nonprofit organization Mathematical Staircase, Inc..