Introducing Professor Poirier

Hi everyone! My pronouns are she/her/hers.

I’m originally from Toronto, Canada and even though I have a French last name and studied a ton of French in school, I can barely speak a word of it! I majored in math and minored in visual art at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. The math thing was kind of unexpected; I always thought I would become an artist and actually discovered that I liked math while I was attending an arts high school. The part of math that first captured my interest was graphs of quadratic functions (one of the topics we’ll study this semester)…I couldn’t believe that math had so much drawing! I was hooked. After undergrad, I moved to New York and completed my Ph.D. in math at the CUNY Graduate Center. Then I taught math at the University of California, Berkeley for three years and I’ve missed the beautiful weather there ever since I moved back to New York! I’ve been a professor at CityTech since 2013. In addition to teaching, I do research in pure math in a field called topology; topology is very visual and I spend a lot of time drawing pictures for my work.

I have several interests outside of work but these days I’m pretty obsessed with running and with my cats. I also read a lot (probably too much) so I have many favorite books. Two of my recent favorite novels are My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite and Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. I’m also a fan of nature documentaries; the animal world is so strange and intense!

I like teaching Precalculus because it’s the kind of course that takes students from more elementary topics to more advanced topics and because it’s the first time students get to see the relationship among different topics they’ve studied before. It also has a lot of graphing, which is one of my favorite things about math. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you this semester!