Professor Emeritus George Francis has had a long and impactful career here at Illinois, a legacy that was recently celebrated with the George Francis Student Engagement Award named in his honor by an anonymous donor. The intention behind the award was to incite faculty to engage with their students in a meaningful way beyond a lecture or seminar much in the same vein as Francis.
Roger Wolfson, Mathematics Development Advisory Board President and former student of Francis, has fond memories of his particular brand of pedagogy: “George (always on a first name basis, even with undergrads) brought such a unique educational style to his teaching environment. Not just a class, it felt more like an extracurricular, in that his students would happily spend extra time working together and with alumni of his class on our projects. George had the habit of getting to know each student’s strengths and working with them to choose an appropriate area of research—even for a 100-level freshman course. I was amazed at the end of the year when we even got an invitation to his house for dinner and found that George and his wife, Bettina, routinely had his course alumni over to mingle with one another and make new friends over shared interests. So routine, in fact, that they eventually built an addition to their house, a large dining area, for these gatherings.”
Anecdotes like these are abundant. It seems like everyone who had the opportunity to work with Francis had stories like this to share. From dinners at his home, to speakers for undergraduate classes, to department-wide picnics, to puppet shows put on during his annual Kinderfasching event, Francis was always busy educating his students and fostering a community within the Department of Mathematics.
When I finally had the chance to ask Francis himself about his philosophy behind teaching, he was quick to emphasize that he has “always taken teaching very, very seriously and that never stopped as [he] grew older.” Francis taught his first class when he was only 18 at Notre Dame summer school in 1957. Back when they “still smoked in the classrooms,” he was teaching adults, some of them old enough to be his parents, but he wasn’t alone. He had an appointed guardian who would query the students and ask them to evaluate Francis’s teaching. The consensus was, “Francis is pretty good, unless he’s not prepared.” Francis took this feedback to heart and began to ensure that he was well prepared for each class that he taught.
As Francis continued his mathematics career, teaching only became more and more of a focus. It quickly became clear that if you wanted to be a research mathematician, you’d better be a teacher. In Francis’s words, “Even writing a paper in mathematics is a teaching event.” This philosophy extended into the classroom where Francis preferred to assign final projects that resembled mathematic research papers as opposed to a traditional final exam stating, “I like to say I’ve spent half of my career teaching future teachers.”
Mid-career, in the late 80’s to 90’s, Francis began to move away from teaching graduate-level geometry and shifted focus towards undergraduate teaching. During this time he was the Founding Director of the UIMATH Applelab (1983-1994) and the grafiXlab (1995-2006), precursors to what would eventually become the Illinois Mathematics Lab; he taught Math 198 “Hypergraphics” freshman honors seminar in geometrical computation for the Campus Honors Program (1990-2006); and developed many undergraduate and graduate courses, chiefly for teachers training which was recognized by the 1994 Campus AMOCO award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.
This era also solidified Francis’s love of visualization, stating in the 1998 PBS documentary Life by the Numbers, “These are pictures of abstract ideas. I started drawing lots of pictures to prove my theorems and as time went by, I found the pictures were more interesting than the theorems themselves. And so, I left the theorem proving to people who could do it better and I do illustration.” In 2006, many of his mathematical illustrations and visualizations were featured in a five-month CALCUL*RT exhibit at the Krannert Art Museum.
Always on the cutting edge of visualization technology, Francis encouraged his students to lead with curiosity and creativity. Wolfson testifies how Francis challenged each student to test their own limits, “I recall with amusement late one Sunday evening my junior year, two years after I was actually enrolled in his class, when I ran into George as I was leaving and he was entering his computer lab at Beckman, he inquired what I’d been working on at that hour, and I replied with perhaps a self-congratulatory tone that I’d just programmed a 3D version of the game Asteroids. George replied, in his very own acerbic way, ‘3D? Why not do it in 4D?’ I was startled and asked with some exasperation, ‘But… How would I do it in 4D??’ His reply: ‘I don’t know. Generalize!’”
It is clear that Francis is an instructor who has thought carefully about how he teaches and intentionally conducts his classroom in a way to promote collaboration between peers and creative problem solving. With his reputation amongst his peers and former students for engaging the Illinois Math community socially, I expected to see some of this come through in his teaching philosophy but when asked, he seemed to think of them as two separate but important functions, stating “My philosophy of teaching is a serious take on research and transmission of knowledge. I do not include service as one of the things. That is simply something that you have to do like brushing your teeth in the morning.”
Francis viewed his outreach and student engagement as an inherent part of the job. He was a teacher, but he was also a community member. He did not construct a plan to become a pillar of the community but instead, took each opportunity he had to make connections and bring people together, something he feels needs to happen organically: “There’s no schema. No, it’s spontaneous. It has to be driven by people.” Building community is about showing up and taking the initiative to connect with others, something that Francis feels is something that comes to him naturally, which he credits at least in part to his father who was a sociologist. Beyond mathematics, Francis’s career is defined by community and coalition building, a process he is proud to see that his sons have carried on in their careers.
George Francis’s legacy continues to have tremendous impact on the Department of Mathematics at Illinois which can be seen in the work of Alexander Yong, the first recipient of the George Francis Student Engagement Award, whose Illinois Combinatorics Lab for Undergraduate Experiences (ICLUE) has been pairing the new generation of mathematicians with experienced mentors. Wolfson hopes this award will encourage more faculty to follow in Francis’s footsteps stating, “I am excited that this teaching award will highlight some of these habits for today’s professors and put a spotlight on those who are doing great work in this vein, of going beyond the core lecture format to get to know their students and encourage them to form connections with one another, across years even, and to drive creativity and collaboration.”
-Written by Jaden Meadows 2025