The Department of Mathematics is excited to announce that two of our members have each received two teaching awards. Both PhD Student Maddy Ritter and Professor Nathan Dunfield have received the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Additionally, from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Ritter has received the Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Assistants. and Dunfield has received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Maddy Ritter has been an active member of the department since 2021. With Bruce Reznick as her adviser, she has been researching exact m-covers and works on graph reconstruction with Professors Alexandr Kostochka and Doug West. Ritter has also served as the outreach manager for the Illinois Mathematics Lab and president of the Graduate Student Chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
As a teaching assistant, Ritter has been leading discussion sections through the Merit Program. Merit discussion sections are twice as long as the standard discussion sections, and enrollment is capped at 24 students, providing more opportunities for group collaboration and instructor guidance. In Ritter’s words, “It is about building community, and having people students feel they can talk to.”
Applications for the Merit Program are open to all students, but the program is targeted towards students with underrepresented backgrounds in STEM fields, a mission that Ritter is particularly passionate about. Ritter states, “I wanted to be a role model for these students. I know most of my students won’t be math majors, but discussion sections are where students get the feel for math. I am representing math when leading. My end goal is to convince students that math doesn’t suck and to think of their time in math with fondness. It’s a duty to pass on positive experiences.”
Ritter believes in teaching from a place of empathy and encourages students to embrace mistakes, “Don’t be afraid of Failure. Failure has been so helpful to me as a teacher. It’s a part of learning. Failure allows me to connect with students and overcome challenges together.” Ritter is thankful for her students and for the formative experience of teaching stating, “I love teaching because I don’t see the point in pursuing higher education if you are not helping someone. If you want to teach, it’s really important to have a motivation. The fulfillment you get from it is priceless.”
Nathan Dunfield has been with the mathematics department since 2007. His research interests include topology and geometry, specifically knots and 3D-manifolds in computations. Dunfield teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses and has received several awards, previously earning the Distinguished Teaching Award in Mathematics for Tenured Faculty in 2012. the same LAS Dean's Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2014, and a campus-wide Caltech teaching award in 2006.
Dunfield’s undergraduate teaching at Illinois has focused on two courses: Calculus III (Math 241) which is taught in 250-person lectures with TA-led discussion sections and Abstract Linear Algebra (Math 416) which is taught in sections of 30, amounting to nearly 3000 students who have taken his courses.
Dunfield describes his approach to teaching mathematics, “For me, the key to teaching mathematics is to remember how difficult it was to learn the material in the first place. Things that I now understand from a multitude of angles, I initially perceived only dimly from a single viewpoint. Thus, it is imperative to have a mental model of what the students already know so they can bridge the gap of understanding.”