New faculty: Tori Day
From prime numbers to integers, Tori Day brings a love for number theory to the mathematics department at Mount Holyoke College.
Assistant Professor of Mathematics Tori Day ’14 has been a visiting faculty at Mount Holyoke College for several years. But when the opportunity to become a tenure-track faculty came around, it was something she couldn’t pass up.
“I think I became a mathematician largely because of my experience at Mount Holyoke. I want to be at a place with a really strong community, with students who are dedicated to being excited not only about their academics but also about helping and supporting each other,” Day said. “When they were hiring for a tenure system job, I thought, ‘Wait, this is really the dream to get to stay here to keep working with these awesome students and to keep working with these awesome colleagues.’”
Growing up in Pomona, New York, Day is an alum of Mount Holyoke College and obtained her doctorate at UMass Amherst. Day has a goal for her work at the College: to empower the next generation of mathematicians.
“As a Mount Holyoke alum, I went on to earn my Ph.D. and become a mathematician because I was so inspired by the faculty that taught me,” she said. “So, when I'm thinking about teaching here and working with students, what I'm really thinking about is how I can empower a younger generation to help us make mathematics a better, more accessible, more joyful, more interesting place — not to mention doing some really cool math along the way.”
Students in Day’s classroom will find that she has a passion for the diversity of the subjects she teaches and the mathematics involved.
“I really love math. I guess what I liked the most about being a number theorist is that there's a bunch of different subfields, so we kind of have a common set of interesting questions about things like prime numbers, integers and solutions to special equations,” Day said. “We get to play in everybody's backyard. Sometimes I use techniques from geometry to answer questions, and other times I use techniques from analysis. What I like the most about being a mathematician is that I get to connect with different people from different backgrounds and answer all sorts of questions.”
Mount Holyoke College builds bonds across disciplines, and Day’s classes are no exception. Her classes feature collaborations with the Department of Mathematics, Speaking, Arguing and Writing (SAW) Center, Miller Worley Center for the Environment and more.
“Last year, some of my classes had collaborations with the SAW Center. That was really cool because my students were writing several mock textbook articles. So, I got to bring in SAW mentors who were the experts on writing and peer editing,” Day said. “They were able to come in and run workshops with my students, so that when they were peer editing and working in writing, they got to learn from their peers, and I thought that was really cool. Then when I taught statistics, we used data from the Miller Worley Center for the Environment to do final projects. The students got to look at not only the data but ask interesting questions about it.”
As Day continues to build her curriculum at Mount Holyoke College, she, along with other members of the department, looks for new ways of making math equitable.
“I've been on this journey really thinking about how we can make mathematics more equitable. How can we make it more accessible? How can we put the emphasis back on learning and not just have it all be about a final grade, which is work that many other people in my department are doing. It’s another great reason to be here,” she said.
Faculty, like students, are always learning, exploring the next opportunity to grow and diversify their knowledge. For Day, her goal is to have students join her in her research in the years to come.
“I haven't had undergraduate students working with me on research before, so that's something that I'm really excited to do. I started working more recently in a subfield of number theory that's new to me, and I've been really enjoying that, so I'm excited to keep pushing myself to branch out in terms of different number theory research areas,” Day said. “I'm excited just to keep teaching different classes, keep trying to do things like pulling some more computing skills into the math classes and just work with my colleagues on making an awesome math curriculum here at Mount Holyoke.”
Mathematics can be so much more than just numbers and equations. That is why one of Day’s favorite classes to teach is discrete mathematics.
“I think sometimes, before you take your first proof writing course, you think of math as this calculation-based thing. You do something, you get a right answer or a wrong answer,” Day said. “That is true about math sometimes, and that's one way to think about math. But when you take your first proof writing class, you learn that there's so much more math out there, and there are so many different ways to think about math. You start getting to make stylistic choices, and you really see that there are often different ways to try to answer the same question. You might be doing homework with your friend, and all of a sudden you've both proved the same thing, but you've done it in different ways. And you're both right.”
