Graduate Student Profile - Matt Jones
Mathematics

Matt Jones, graduate student and teaching assistant in mathematics, was on duty in UCLA's Student Math Center when Heather Tierney, a junior transfer student in pre-business economics, turned up in the Fall of 1998. "Petrified because I needed to take another calculus class," Heather says, she was there seeking help. "To put it simply, I was floundering."

As they worked together in the following weeks, Matt walked Heather through the thinking process he uses for various math problems, then asked her to explain the solution to make sure she understood. Seeing that "math anxiety was a major hurdle" for Heather, Matt offered encouragement and patience. "After awhile, my confidence and skill at solving problems grew," she says. "Math turned from being an odious chore to a fascinating challenge."

This kind of conversion experience, and honors like his department's Distinguished Teaching Award, are motivating Matt as he looks beyond UCLA to a lifetime career. When he started graduate school, Matt saw research and teaching as equally desirable parts of an eventual job at a major research university. Now, he says, "I really like the teaching significantly more than the research, so I've been applying to teach in the Cal State system or at a community college."

Always good at math, Matt often helped other students with their work as he moved through school, and tutoring "paid my rent as an undergrad" at UCLA. Recent work as a TA and a part-time job at Pierce College confirmed his career choice.

Another factor in Matt's decision is a desire to stay in Southern California. Raised in Santa Monica, Matt and his friends regularly went body boarding and surfing before heading off to classes at St. Monica's High School. He's the third generation of his family to live in Los Angeles and to attend UCLA. And his wife has a job teaching math at Santa Monica High School. They met as UCLA undergraduates, and Matt remarks that she married him in spite of the fact that doing so made her name Jenny Jones.

When Matt arrived at UCLA in the now-defunct High School Scholars Program, the first class he took was in basic calculus. He'd been considering an engineering career but soon settled into an undergraduate math major. As he moved into upper division classes as a sophomore, he ran into some professors who "mathematically speaking, helped me to grow up," he says. The first 13 years of math are basically computation-oriented, Matt explains. "You're handed a technique, and you apply it to a bunch of examples." Growing up mathematically means understanding "why things happen, why the proofs and techniques you've learned actually work."

Matt found an intellectual home in algebraic geometry, where his work involves understanding how a curve is expressed in polynomials, mathematical expressions like a + bx + cx2. To analyze these curves, he uses what he calls "advanced machinery-not something you can hold in your hand and throw at a piece of paper," he explains, but rather techniques you can use that provide information.

Matt is bringing new techniques-Kodaira's vanishing theorem and McAulay's initial ideals-to a traditional problem, his dissertation adviser, Mark Green, says. His work is "connected to a very important conjecture in algebraic geometry and represents an interesting point of view."

While academic mathematicians often have a strong passion for their field, "that's not the only passion we respect," Professor Green says. "Matt is equally passionate about different things," he says, and unusual in his early commitment to teaching at educational institutions where "although research is a component, it doesn't play as big a role as it does at a place like UCLA."

Matt understands that his new work is more likely to involve remedial math and intermediate algebra than the "grown up" kind of math he's been doing at UCLA, but "that doesn't bother me," he says. Teaching still motivates him. "If you're conscientious about it, after every lesson, you can see what worked and what didn't and there's a constant improvement process on your part to get a few more people to understand the next time you go around."

Matt will bring to his work a philosophy about math phobia. "If people fear math, it becomes a big obstacle," Matt says. "They see math as a disorganized jumble of things that they need to learn to do." His experience has shown that "people who do better are those who look for ways to find patterns, and make sense, and superimpose order on things."

Proof that it works? Heather Tierney, that undergrad who Matt tutored back in Fall of 1998, is now a graduate student in economics at UC Riverside and permanently "hooked on the delight" of learning math. Returning the favor of his tutelage, Heather provided a letter of recommendation for Matt in his search for a teaching job. Her final words in the letter say "I hope to be a TA eventually. I fully intend to emulate Matt's teaching style of patience, inclusion, and thoroughness."

Published in Spring 2001, Graduate Quarterly