Joshua Zucker

I’m Joshua, he/him. I co-founded the first Math Teachers’ Circle in 2006 and helped start circles around the country as part of AIM’s How To Run A Math Teachers’ Circle series of workshops. I am also the founding director of the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festivals. For me, these activities are vital in finding collaborative ways to bring interesting mathematics to teachers and students. How can we join together in applying creative and critical thinking skills to mathematics problems? What big-picture strategies help us navigate the frustration of a difficult problem and turn it into an approachable, fun challenge? How can we take something apparently simple that we may take for granted and probe deeply enough into it to generate interesting questions? For the past 15 years I’ve been learning and practicing some ways to answer those questions as a teacher at Art of Problem Solving, through math circles and festivals, and in my work with students and teachers around the country.