For quite a while now I've wanted to start a small blog/teaching platform where I try to give some intuition for various concepts in math, so that's what most of the website will be. To start, a little about myself. I'm currently doing a master's of science in mathematics at Simon Fraser University researching integer solutions to equations \(1^k+2^k+\cdots+x^k=y^n\) under Dr. Imin Chen and Dr. Stephen Choi. I completed my bachelor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo where I majored in Pure Mathematics/Teaching, and minored in computer science and psychology. I also completed a diploma in Chinese language, 可是我的中文说得不太好。 Unfortunately, I don't practice this at all anymore, so I'm very quickly losing my Chinese.
My biggest interest at the moment is math outreach and Indigenous mathematics. My family is ancestrally Cree (I think Swampy Cree is more accurate) from the James Bay region of Ontario, but growing up in the city with my non-Indigenous mom, I was not exposed to any culture. Like many urban Indigenous people, I've been slowly trying to learn about my family's culture. Doing this through math seems to be a good entry point, since I'm very comfortable in a western maths setting, and this provides a base point to explore my culture.
I was first seriously introduced to this idea of Indigenous math at the 2023 Canadian Mathematical Society's Winter Meeting, where Dr. Edward Doolittle gave a presentaion of what this might mean. More recently, I've spent my first term at SFU going on classroom visits with Dr. Veselin Jungic through the Math Catcher program, where we do math workshops with classes of any age. While Veselin himself is not Indigenous, he has worked closely in his career with many Indigenous people to develop the Math Catcher program (amongst many other wonderful programs), which teaches math with an emphasis on Indigenous story telling. The reach of the Math Catcher program is truly marvelous. Veselin has travelled to schools all across BC to do this workshop, and most recently, Veselin and I had the pleasure of being invited to do his workshop in Whitehorse, Yukon, by the Yukon First Nation Education Directorate.
In the 2025 year, I intend to run a math workshop with Indigenous students at SFU where we study concepts of group theory by connecting it to Indigenous cultures. What this means or what this will look like, I'm not too sure yet. Click the Indigenous Group Theory tab above to see what's happening with that.
On top of all this, I'm also a part time high school math and computer science teacher at Canaway Private School, an online high school with a focus on Central and South American students. So far, I've taught MDM4U (Mathematics of Data Management), which is basics statistics and probability and MHF4U (Advanced Functions), which is pre-calculus. I'm currently creating asynchronus computer science courses for the school, ICS3U and ICS4U, which I hope to eventually look into connections to Indigenous cultures and AI.
When I'm not studying or teaching, I love hiking and travelling, so I've also started a few pages for the hikes and trips that I've been on.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at james_houle@sfu.ca.