Introducing Kate Poirier

I grew up in Toronto, Canada. I speak English and a teeny tiny bit of French (embarrassingly little for a Canadian with a French last name). I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, were I majored in math and minored in visual art. I then moved to New York and completed my Ph.D. in math at the CUNY Graduate Center. I spent three years at the University of California, Berkeley before moving back to New York. This is my fourth year at CityTech.

I didn’t find math in elementary and middle school very interesting and I didn’t think I was very good at it. (I thought I was going to be an artist and that math wasn’t important.) I’m still not very good at arithmetic, but it turns out…that doesn’t matter! There’s a whole world of math outside of adding and subtracting! The first topic that I really got into in high school was graphing quadratic functions and I still remember exactly how my fantastic teacher, Ms. Kamino, taught it.  I thought it was incredible how algebra (which until then I thought was pretty boring, but at least I was good at it) connected with these beautiful pictures of parabolas. We didn’t even have pretty graphing tools back then! Since then, any kind of math that has a visual element has really appealed to me, especially when it describes–or is described by–some underlying algebraic structure. In my own research in topology, I draw lots and lots of pictures!

In my own teaching, I like using online graphing tools the best. Visualizing the graph of a function can be hard for some people and there are some really great tools out there that can help people understand functions quickly and easily. I’m most looking forward to the dynamic geometry software unit of this class. I love geometry, and I haven’t taught a geometry class before, so it’ll be especially fun to explore this tool more!