AMS Early Career Profile: Lawrence Pack

Lawrence Pack Undergraduate Institution: University of California, Davis Position: Math Teacher Employer: Peace Corps Industry Sector: Education

What he does:

• Lawrence Pack joined the Peace Corps in 2004 and was sent to the West African country of Guinea. Lawrence lives in a small rural village where he teaches mathematics, physics, and English to 7th, 8th, and 9th grade students. Two of the three goals of the Peace Corps are, helping to promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the people served and helping to promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the Americans.

  To best achieve these goals, Lawrence lives as the people he serves do; he lives in a mud hut with no electricity and no running water.

Math on the job:

• Teaching in rural West Africa poses numerous problems. Resources are limited to a minimum: chalk and textbooks are scarcely available, and often students cannot afford to buy pens, pencils, and paper. The school building itself is run down with no air conditioning despite 120 degree heat. All these obstacles require Lawrence to come up with unique and creative ways of teaching to reach his students. As Lawrence says, adaptability is the most important skill for anybody wanting to work overseas.

  Lawrence's work is not limited to the classroom. He is also an active leader in his community, leading and organizing seminars on everything from HIV/AIDS to women's empowerment. While the mathematics level he needs for his job is not that high, Lawrence's mathematical background plays an important role in his work, the most important thing mathematics teaches us is not what a diffeomorphism is or how to solve a partial differential equation, but instead it teaches us how to think. It provides a powerful paradigm of problem solving techniques applicable in virtually everything we encounter in our lives.

Lawrence's education:

• As an undergraduate Lawrence double-majored in math and physics and received his B.S. in 2001 from the University of California, Davis. He then went on to receive his M.A. in mathematics, once again from the University of California, Davis in 2003. Lawrence believes that, for anybody considering a career in mathematics or the physical sciences, linear algebra is by far the most important subject.

Advice for students:

• Lawrence has two pieces of advice for those considering studying mathematics:

  "People often ask, why study mathematics?

  I personally believe the inherent beauty in mathematics is reason in and of itself to warrant its study. But this beauty is hidden behind difficult and often obscure properties and logic. So, just like anything else, you have to put in the time to first learn the fundamentals. And once you do that, a whole new world opens up. And then you realize that, as Bertrand Russell says, mathematics possesses a beauty, cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, sublimely pure, such as only the greatest art can show.

  The best thing about my job is that at the end of the day, I know I've done something meaningful. As members of the human family we have a responsibility to consider the well-being of others. And so I ask everyone to please consider the social implications their work."