Core Members
Victor Gutenmacher
Victor Gutenmacher is a distinguished mathematician and educator. He was a Professor of Mathematics at Moscow State University for almost twenty years and has extensive teaching experience at all levels, from secondary school to graduate school. He served as a member of the Editorial Board of Quantum (a top educational mathematics and science magazine in Russia that was, for over a decade, published in English by the National Science Teachers Association in conjunction with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) where he also organized and directed the “Teacher’s Corner,” a section of the magazine devoted to creating instructional materials for teachers. In addition, he served as the Chairman of the Methodology Committee for the Gelfand Correspondence School, a member of the Methodology Committee of the USSR Mathematics Olympics, a member of the Advisory Panel on the Committee for American Mathematics Competitions, and as the coach of the Soviet Team at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Dr. Gutenmacher is the author of more than 80 publications in mathematics and mathematics education, most notably the classic text Lines and Curves which has been translated into several languages including English.
Ilya Bronshtein
Ilya Bronshtein holds an M.A. in mathematics and a B.A. in computer science from Brandeis University. As a student he published research but decided to leave academia and devote himself to fixing the education problems that he encountered when he was in school. Over the years, he has taught classes and led math and computer science circles for adults and K-12 students in public and private schools, and in the homeschooling community. He has also developed software that students use to discover ideas in mathematics, computer science, physics, and biology while learning how to code. Ilya attended the Newton and Brookline public schools and is intimately aware of the challenges and opportunities that they and other American schools present.
Tatyana Finkelstein
Tatyana Finkelstein is an award-winning mathematics teacher who has taught for over a decade in the Lexington Public School system after teaching mathematics for a decade in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is a 2006 recipient of the Distinguished High School Mathematics Teaching Edyth May Sliffe Award. Ms. Finkelstein has years of experience in teacher professional development, as a counselor in the PROMYS for Teachers program at Boston University, an intensive 6 week summer mathematics program for teachers, and as a participant in the Park City Mathematics Institute Secondary School Teachers Program. She has also run a summer mathematics program for middle school students in Lexploration, a Lexington-based initiative that serves surrounding communities.
Boris Klebanov
Boris Klebanov holds a PhD degree in mathematics from Moscow State University. He has taught mathematics at levels ranging from postgraduate studies to high school classes and summer camps for gifted elementary school students. Dr. Klebanov has also authored many publications on the topic of problem solving and olympiad-style mathematics. He was the Director of the Math Circle for school students run under the auspices of the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science and was Chairman of the Moscow Organizing Committee of the Kangaroo Mathematics Contest. Together with his students he participated in the International Junior Mathematical Congress. He has taught at the Math Circle in Boston and several of his students achieved high scores in the American Mathematics Contest and American Invitational Mathematics Examination. Dr. Klebanov has also edited several mathematics textbooks for leading US educational publishers.
Tanya Khovanova
Tanya Khovanova holds a PhD degree in mathematics from Moscow State University and was a gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She is an educator, a blogger, and a popularizer of mathematics who has a keen interest in the subject of women in mathematics. Besides coaching the math team at the Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School in Marlborough, MA she has been an organizer of the Women and Mathematics program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Khovanova helped design the Math Alive course at Princeton University which seeks to expose those who have not had college mathematics to the concepts behind important modern applications. As a research scientist at the Council on Cybernetics under the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, she designed innovative educational programs in computer science for children.
Advisers
Wallace Feurzeig
Wallace Feurzeig is a Principal Scientist at BBN Technologies with extensive experience in mathematics education. The central focus of his work is in research, design, and application of advanced technology to improve learning and teaching. He conducted the first teaching experiments involving children’s use of an interactive programming language. This work led directly to the development of the LOGO programming language in 1966 by Feurzeig and collaborators. He has authored and edited numerous books including Modeling and Simulation in Precollege Science and Mathematics. He has been Principal Investigator on several NSF mathematics education research projects including Programming Languages as a Conceptual Framework for Teaching Mathematics and Advanced Mathematics from an Elementary Viewpoint. These projects have produced widely disseminated educational software tools including Logo, the Algebra Workbench, MultiMap, and Function Machines.
Deborah Belle
Deborah Belle is a Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Human Development Program at Boston University. She has been a chair of the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) network and has worked to encourage girls to pursue science and mathematics careers. Professor Belle has also focused her attention on the issues surrounding poverty and inequality and the ways in which they affect children and their education. She is the author of several publications on the subject including the book The After-school Lives of Children: Alone and With Others While Parents Work.