Matt Reichenbach
- Faculty Fellow
Bio: I was born in Longmont, CO and have two younger sisters. I attended CU 麻豆影院 as an undergraduate, first majoring in psychology, then economics, then philosophy, before finally settling on mathematics. I trained to be a high-school teacher and did my student teaching at Longmont High School, before moving to South Korea to teach elementary English for a year. While I was in Korea, I realized that I wanted to study more math, and maybe even do research some day. I was accepted to graduate school in mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where I spent the next five-and-a-half years teaching and doing research in mathematical ecology. During my final summer at UNL, I got an internship with the Geospatial Research Laboratory (GRL) in Alexandria, VA doing research in applications of machine learning to remote sensing. After the end of my internship, GRL hired me as a full-time Research Mathematician to continue my machine learning work, and to model the spread of invasive carp in the Mississippi River system. After two-and-a-half years at GRL, I decided to get back into teaching, and luckily found a Teaching Professor position in beautiful 麻豆影院, CO!
Are there other life experiences that are integral to where you are today?
Both teaching in Korea and doing research for the federal government taught me that I can still be successful even when I鈥檓 doing something wildly different than what I thought I would ever do. I gained a lot of confidence in those roles, because I was so unsure of my abilities at the beginning.
What are some experiences that have helped your professional journey?
I have worked as a teacher for the majority of my professional life, but those skills have helped immensely when I worked in a research setting for the federal government. I have had the good fortune to work with students of all ages and from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, which has helped me to constantly improve my communication skills. In a professional setting, solving problems is only part of the battle; the cleverest solution is worthless if you can鈥檛 explain it in a way that other people understand!
What are you most excited about serving as a faculty fellow at BOLD?
I am most looking forward to helping students navigate the calculus sequence, by directly helping them in office hours and by mentoring tutors. These are difficult classes but are necessary for all engineering majors, so I like to help as much as I can. As a professor, I often have hundreds of students in my calculus lectures, and it can be difficult to get to know the students very well. With the BOLD Center, I will be able to work with the same students over many years, and I hope to learn more about what inspires them as future engineers and scientists.
What have been a couple memorable teaching moments for you?
I taught 1st through 4th grade English when I worked in South Korea. None of the first-graders knew any English when I started, and I also didn鈥檛 know any Korean at that point. You won鈥檛 be surprised to hear that it鈥檚 difficult to teach a room full of 7 year-olds when you don鈥檛 share a common language! However, many of the skills I learned, like using music, games, and body language, are things I might not have developed otherwise.
How can mathematics be applied in science and society in ways we may not even realize?
The more mathematics Iearn, the more I realize how many advanced mathematical ideas are being used throughout society. When a TV network 鈥渃alls an election鈥 for a certain candidate before all the votes are in, they鈥檙e using a complicated statistical model that likely takes into account historical voting patterns for regions and recent poll numbers. These models allow them to quantify the probability that they鈥檙e making the wrong prediction, and when that probability is small enough, they feel confident in making a prediction, hopefully before the other TV networks do! This is only one small example, but similar ideas get used every day in weather forecasting, sports, and all kinds of business applications.
Beyond mathematics, what are other interests and passions that drive you?
I like to explore the natural world, from hiking in the mountains, to swimming in the ocean, but also by taking a telescope out on a dark night. I also like to learn about people around the world through the food they eat. One can learn a lot about the history and values of a culture through the ingredients and techniques they use in their cooking.