Françoise Trudeau-Reeves The University of Ottawa’s Excellence in Education prizes recognize educators of exceptional quality, who provide outstanding teaching while maintaining a solid research program. Profiles of each of the seven prize winners in 2006 will appear in the Gazette
over the coming months.
In a hallway on the second floor of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, a blackboard stands covered with a virtual forest of symbols and numbers. Students and professors typically use the board—located on the same floor as Professor Thierry Giordano’s office—between classes to continue the various discussions started during class. Giordano, recipient of the 2006 Excellence in Education Prize, approaches the board and gestures toward the various clusters of symbols: “This one wants to say something....that one does not—that is simply graffiti.”
It is perhaps his capacity to make sense of such “forests” of mathematical concepts which so enamors the students of this highly skilled teacher. A science of rigor and logic, abstract yet absolutely fundamental, mathematics is as repulsive to some minds as it is inspiring to others.
“Mathematics is an exceedingly vibrant science,” insists Giordano, pointing out that mathematicians have made more progress since the end of the Second World War than in the entire history before it.
“Teaching mathematics can be quite challenging,” admits Giordano. This remark is aimed by and large at what he calls “service courses,” taught to students from other disciplines, from engineering to biology to administration. Most difficult of all, according to Professor Giordano, is the challenge of instilling mathematical reasoning. This kind of learning, he explains, involves an intuitive component—posing hypotheses and speculating solutions—and a more formal component which consists of showing proofs for these statements
One of the first professors to create a website for his courses, Giordano (with fellow professor Joseph Khoury) is behind such initiatives as the Problem of the Month, which will be offered to high school students in the Ottawa area this autumn. In 1998, he and colleague Barry Jessup also updated a database of problems for first-year students in linear algebra that is now continually accessed and updated.
Giordano participates in activities such the Esso-CMS summer math camps for high school students and was the lead organizer of a Fields Institute for Research in Mathematics summer school which brought more than 70 students and graduates from around the world to Ottawa for two weeks in the summer of 2005.
Returning himself from a scientific meeting in British Columbia, Giordano believes that these kinds of gatherings are essential to the growth and advancement of mathematics. “In mathematics, the solution to a problem is often inspired through discussion and debate.” All one needs is enough grey matter and a blackboard.
