What picture pops into your head when you think about someone making a difference in math education? Maybe it isn’t who you would expect.
When Hurricane Irma swept through Orlando, conferences were cancelled and speaking engagements were put off till less stormy days. Dr. Po-Shen Loh, National Coach of the USA Math Olympiad Team, and Founder of Expii, Carnegie Mellon Mathematics Professor, had been scheduled to give a presentation with the Orlando Math Circle to the Florida Association, but the conference was cancelled.
Gabrielle Salina, a sophomore studying health sciences at the University of Central Florida and an Orlando Math Circle volunteer, decided to do something about it. She knew the topic of Dr. Po-Shen Loh’s intended talk– Developing Extreme Math Talent: How to bring the majority of Americans to the level currently reached by the top 1%– was something her fellow students needed to hear. She felt it was important to have Dr. Loh Po speak to our community of students so he could inspire more to participate and contribute their talents to revitalize math education everywhere.
Dr. Loh’s revolutionary new math website, Expii, has been partnering with the Orlando Math Circle in a math video project. This project invites Orlando students to use their talents in art, music, acting and math to make math come alive in video to students worldwide, and has already been gaining traction in high schools throughout the area.
So she worked hard to reschedule the event, and organized a speaking engagement and workshop that gave Orlando students an opportunity to see what math really is—and that it belongs to all of us. This past Saturday Dr. Loh shared with an Orlando audience the secret to developing math talent everywhere, and Gabriella Salinas was there, volunteering.
Gabriella Salinas is a wonderful example of someone who has bucked the stereotypes and won her own her place in mathematics research and education. She was born in Peru and came to this country when she was 8 years old. Gabriella joined the Orlando Math Circle as a volunteer in high school and has been participating for the past three years.
As a teacher’s assistant she noticed disparities between boys and girls in her classes. The girls hardly talked in class, and as they got closer to middle school age their class participation grew less and less. In electives such as physics fewer and fewer girls enrolled. Gabriella started researching women in mathematics and found that the statistics were bleak.
Although women earned 57.3% of bachelors degrees in all fields, their participation in science and engineering in the undergraduate level is greatly underrepresented. Women earned just 17.9% of computer science undergraduate degrees, 19.3 % of engineering degrees, 39% of physical science degrees and 43.1% mathematical degrees in that year. The numbers for minority women are even smaller.
This inspired her to organize one of the Orlando Math Circle’s present programs, Encouraging Girls in Math and Science. This initiative works to invite middle and high school girls to an area they’ve traditionally been shut out of—the math and science arena. Using art, music, and sport, Gabriella Salinas and the Orlando Math Circle have been demonstrating that math is not the boring dry subject many of us have led to believe it is.
Whether it is representing Orlando students in a workshop for a national math contest or helping little children cut out equilateral triangles for the OMC’s Trianglathon, Gabrielle Salina has learned the secret of catalyzing social change: step up and do your own bit to make a difference wherever you are.
The Orlando Math Circle is currently accepting interns and volunteers for the 2017-2018 academic year. If you’d like to be involved, visit their website and sign up.
