At Adventures with Mr. Math, we believe that a great many children are born with an innate talent for math, but that talent is crushed by the minutia of mathematical techniques. And so, generation after generation, kids grow up into math-fearing adults. We help kids explore the incredible world of math and discover that math is an exciting adventure!

Those who watched “The Pirates of Caribbean” may remember Captain Jack Sparrow telling Elizabeth when they are stuck on an uninhabited island: “a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that’s what a ship needs but what a ship is… what the Black Pearl really is… is freedom.” This is the way Mr. Math sees math: “arithmetics and algebra and calculus, those are tools a mathematician needs… but what math really is… is freedom.”

A mathematician is a discoverer of distant worlds bound by nothing but his or her imagination. We get to explore the only realm which has no constraints of reality. Like Columbus, Magellan, and Neil Armstrong, a mathematician can go beyond the horizon to where no one has ever gone before. The reason mathematicians love math is not because it is an important science, though it certainly is, but because the world of math is incredibly beautiful. Math is not just a science, math is a game!

Unfortunately, the school system focuses mostly on the mechanics and tools of math rather on the beauty of it. Kids learn and repeat various techniques until they become proficient and … bored. While teaching math techniques is a necessary part, too often it kills the math spirit. Thus millions upon millions of adults do not understand math and are afraid of it.

One of the most gifted mathematicians in the history was an Indian prodigy, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Even though Ramanujan had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made extraordinary contributions to various areas of math. Numbers were not just mathematical objects to him – they were his friends. When his skills became apparent to the wider mathematical community, he began a famous partnership with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy. Upon Ramanujan’s death, Hardy wrote about his originality and lack of formal education “if he had been caught and tamed a little in his youth … he would have been less of a Ramanujuan and more of a European professor.”

The main goal of our program is to “wake up” the little Ramanujan in each child and lead them onto the path to the math world of incredible beauty!