Marlene Orton
Joseph Khoury has a aptitude for bringing mathematics down to earth for his students. He breathes life into linear algebra with applications from genetics to sociology for students who have trouble grasping the importance of lengthy equations scribbled across wide blackboards.
“Basically the idea is finding a way to teach mathematics that will stimulate the students,” says Khoury, honoured by his peers as the 2003 Part-Time Professor of the Year Award at the University of Ottawa.
“The challenge is to try always to make sense of everything we do,” he adds. “Even the hardest theory has a real life application to it.”
A part-time professor since 2001, Khoury has been teaching at the University since 1996 when he began work on his doctorate in mathematics. He has always loved math and has looked to mathematical equations as a means of solving the mysteries of the universe. In high school at age 15 he took on a lengthy science project using differential equations to show how the planets moved in an elliptical rather than circular orbit around the sun.
“I was fascinated by all the theory behind that and the power behind it,” he recalls now. He made an aborted attempt to study engineering and switched after only six months.
Khoury, who is also director of the Math Help Centre, takes enormous satisfaction in knowing he has reached out to students and can gauge whether the class has understood in full the lesson of any particular given day. This year he is teaching first-level courses and has the luxury of a class with only 50 students compared with a group last year of 250.
“First year is the hardest year,” he says. “You have to bring yourself close to their level and can’t assume they understand what you are taking about.”
To make life a little easier for students, Khoury co-hosts a Web site called Linear Algebra Close to Earth with Professor Barry Jessup, also of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Jessup too is among this year’s winners of an Excellence in Education Prize of the University of Ottawa. The site was a project designed by Jessup with funding provided by the prize. The site visually demonstrates the goal of both men: to explain the relevance of the material they are studying. Without that critical connection, Khoury believes, student motivation can be seriously hampered. And the effect is most dramatic with first-year linear algebra.
The site offers the same real-life applications from examining downtown traffic flow to weather patterns that Khoury holds to in his classes. “For a first-year student, the proof is always the tricky part,” he says. “They see the result, they try to understand the result but when they try to do the proof of the result, it’s difficult. When I write a theorem, I give an example of how it can be applied in real-life terms. It becomes something very useful for them when they can see the relevance and what they can do with it, and the power of it.”
