Who are the people that make MathILy happen?
Mostly it's students (perhaps you?), but there are also
instructors (former instructors here, and for current instructors see just a bit 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. sarah-marie belcastro,
MathILy director and Lead Instructor ()
sarah-marie earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University
of Michigan in 1997 after majoring in mathematics and astronomy at
Haverford College. Among her research areas, she is most
passionate about topological graph theory. sarah-marie has been
faculty at several institutions, ranging from small colleges to
large universities, and she's been a major believer in
discovery-based learning since her teacher training at Michigan.
In addition to teaching at the college level, sarah-marie teaches
enrichment classes at the Art of Problem
Solving. sarah-marie taught as a senior staff member at the
Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics for 11 summers and
co-directed that program for 4 summers. She is the inaugural director of MathILy and has taught there since 2013. She wrote the
introductory textbook Discrete
Mathematics with Ducks, which has much of the same
tone students will find at MathILy.
Dr. Hannah Alpert,
Lead Instructor
Hannah earned her Ph.D. from MIT in 2016 specializing in geometry and is now a math researcher at IDA CCR-La Jolla. She authored/co-authored 6 mathematical research papers before starting graduate school, and has written several problems that have appeared in the AMC 8; her coding strength is writing Python code that writes TikZ code that draws complicated pictures automatically. Hannah has taught at MathPath and at Mathcamp and at the Boston Math Circle and at the first 10 instances of MathILy. She thinks almost everything is too sweet, including limes, but excluding lemons.
Dr. Brian Freidin,
Lead Instructor
Brian earned his Ph.D. from Brown University studying differential geometry and is now a faculty member at the University of San Diego and the Russian School of Mathematics. He did research as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois through the Geometry Lab and the Center for Complex Systems Research. He has taught at the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics and MathILys 2015--2025.
Dr. Thomas Hull, Lead
Instructor
Tom earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1997 and specializes in
the mathematics of origami, which has applications ranging from
solar panels to automobile airbags to self-assembling polymers. He
has earned tenure at one college and one university (so far) and
has used more and more inquiry-based learning in college classes
as he has advanced in his career. Tom taught at the Hampshire
College Summer Studies in Mathematics for 15 summers, and at MathILys 2013--25.
Dr. Berit Givens,
Lead Instructor
Berit Givens is Professor and is thankfully no longer Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Cal Poly Pomona. She earned a PhD in logic and set-theoretic topology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She enjoys exploring many different areas of mathematics, and she has published papers in logic, combinatorics, semigroups, Poisson geometry, and the mathematics of fiber arts. To the right is the worst possible photo of her. (A more representative one can be seen here.)
Dr. David Gonzalez,
Lead Instructor
David earned his PhD from University of California, Berkeley and is now a postdoc at the University of Notre Dame. He enjoys talking and thinking about the foundations of mathematics, logic, language and computation. A big step in his mathematical journey was attending MathILy in 2014. When not doing math, he enjoys hiking (really being outside in general) and watching the very worst movies in existence (and occasionally watching good ones too). He was an Apprentice Instructor 2022--2025.
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 juggles teaching, Palestine advocacy, pottery, doom-scrolling, percussion, programming, ballroom dancing, math research, mutual aid, West Coast swing dancing, and sleeping (barely). He was a MathILy Apprentice Instructor in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, and a MathILy-Er Apprentice Instructor in 2024 and 2025.
Frank Lu,
Apprentice Instructor
Frank is a graduate student at Harvard University, where he will likely be studying algebraic number theory. Besides math and piano, Frank also enjoys writing and playing games of various types with friends. He attended MathILy in 2018, was the FRANK (Facilitates Rumination, Activating New Knowledge) in 2020, and an Apprentice Instructor 2023--25.
Ian Shors,
Apprentice Instructor
Ian graduated from Harvey Mudd College in 2023 with a math major and is now a math PhD student at UCLA. He enjoys thinking about all things algebraic and/or combinatorial. While at Harvey Mudd College, he worked as a math tutor with the peer tutoring organization AE, and played trombone in the Pomona jazz ensemble. In his free time, he enjoys solving Rubik's cubes (which he can do moderately quickly) and watching soccer. He participated in MathILy in 2018.
Saskia Solotko,
Apprentice Instructor
Saskia is a senior at Tufts University, where she studies mathematics. Next year she will attend Mathematics Part III at the University of Cambridge, funded by a Churchill scholarship, before returning to the US for a PhD program in the fall of 2027. She is especially interested in interactions between combinatorics, algebraic geometry, and representation theory. In her spare time, she loves playing water polo, rowing with a local masters team, running in Boston, and getting frozen yogurt with her teammates.
Will Bender,
Apprentice Instructor
Will is a senior math major at Haverford College. He plans to attend grad school at a mysterious, unknown location to pursue a PhD in mathematics. He attended MathILy in 2018, 2019, and 2020. His interests include going down mathematical Wikipedia rabbit holes, board games, Doctor Who, and Pokémon.
Caroline Cashman,
PRiME FACToR (Protector and Responder in the MathILy Environment, Facilitator of Academics and CriTiquer of wRiting)
Caroline is a senior at the College of William & Mary and plans to attend graduate school next fall where she hopes to keep studying graph theory. Her hobbies include knitting, playing piano, rock climbing, and running. She especially enjoys when she can make cool mathematical shapes out of her running routes. She has yet to make any cool mathematical shapes out of her climbing routes but once she learns how to levitate she will give it another try.
MathILy, MathILy-Er, and MathILy-EST are projects of the nonprofit organization Mathematical Staircase, Inc..