You can see the official webpage for Outreach at the Math Dept. of U of T in here.

I have worked in outreach since I arrived at the Math Department at the University of Toronto.

I have mainly worked in three different types of activities:

• Math Academy: These were courses that occurred over the course of one week and were intense. Usually, we meet in the morning and in the evenings of this week. The nature of this prevents us to really be engaged with many long exercises, in homework format, because we are moving at a fast pace.
• Advanced High School Courses: I suggested to the outreach office that we should have courses, aimed at high school students, that show the aspect of mathematics that many times is lost in our other type of programs. That is, the hard work that comes with struggling with demanding homeworks and being evaluated. In a certain sense, these courses were aimed at showing the students how a usual course in undergrad of mathematics looks like in a reduced scale. For some of them we even had TA to grade their homeworks. These courses run on weekends over one to two months.
• Mentorship Programs: This program is aimed at showing to high school students what it is to do research in mathematics. It is a program that runs over the course of five months. Usually the mentors are faculty professors, postdocs or graduate students. They form groups of one up to three students and they engage in some project together. This can be a reading course format or solving some problems together or trying to find out answers to more complicated questions.

My contribution to the above programs.

My contribution for the above projects were of two different sorts. On the side of the courses, I suggested the creation of the Advanced High School courses, as opposed to the math academies. They were very successful albeit challenging to implement at the start. The two main components of difficulty were the demands on homework (the students were expected to do the work and, also, the work was not always immediate.) Most students had problems at the start, but the majority found their footing after some time.

The other contribution was in the mentorship program. In the year 2022 I had a very successful work done with the students of this year. I considered that what they have done was good enough to be presented as a work in the Canadian Undergraduate Mathematical Conference (CUMC) which that year would happen in Quebec.

This was the first time that the mentorship program sent students to present their work to undergrads that were actually studying mathematics. It was very successful, and the work was very well received. It actually became a paper which, at the moment of writing this, is being submitted to a journal.

This opened the door to trying this again next year. However, in 2023 the process occurred by competition. Since the CUMC 2023 happened in Toronto, the Outreach Office had support to take five groups (as opposed to only one!). The teams that wanted to compete for a place in this event had to present their work to a jury composed of grad students and faculty (even the chair of the math department was part of the jury!). It was amazing to see the highschoolers present their math work for a place in the conference.

My team got selected again, together with other four teams, and again the works were very well received!

This again was done in CUMC 2024! This time the event occurred at UBC in Vancouver. Thus, the outreach department could only support one team to go. This time my team did not get selected! As sad as it is to not win, it feels a success that the idea moves with new projects and new work. The team that went to UBC was directed by a wonderful grad student, Matthew Bolan, on topics he enjoys researching around infinite chess.

The Outreach Programs I have directed

Below is a list of the different programs I ran during my participation in the outreach office of the Department of Mathematics of U of T. Click on any of them to go to a page with some description of what was done in them.