“It was evident to me that mathematics was a subject about truths that transcend culture. I probably understood this before I could articulate it.”

He realized we needed a dictionary to help us better communicate across teams. I had already written one, but Jake was the only dev to take a look. Over the months we spent together on that project, he took the time to personally pre-read my Jira tickets and tell me where there would be a disconnect between the language of education and the language of engineering. I passed those lessons on to the education team, so that we could better facilitate automation and development. 

When he joined our team, Jake improved communication between groups by acting as a scientist when engaging in conversation: simultaneously as both teacher and student. He interacted with the understanding that academics are the foundation of EdTech. He worked with the education team, listening to feedback that most of the others ignored. He cared about students’ growth. He cared about the quality of the product. While other devs ran a script and considered the job complete, Jake never passed off work to us that he had not carefully reviewed himself. Jake’s capacity for pattern recognition left me absolutely star-struck. He was noticing things I had overlooked. He was the one to point out how patterns in the resolution of the math problems defined the cognitive load and difficulty. While I was finding various LLMs consistently made errors, he intuitively saw what those errors were to predict when they would occur. Our team made more progress under his leadership than any other time in the lifetime of the project. 

Jake is not just a software developer, but a mathematician, a master of pattern recognition, a scientist, and an educator. Jake has applied his knowledge of mathematics and algorithms to Human Resources, Accounting, Education Technology, and Energy. When asked about his goals in the EdTech industry, Jake says, “Having observed a world that is becoming decreasingly mathematically literate at a time when we need the opposite, I am aiming to make a significant impact on how humans, including my own children, learn mathematics.”  He goes on to say, “I will consider my career a success if, quite often, as a result of my work, humans learn something about the world they wouldn’t otherwise have learned.”

There is a practical, hippocratic approach to Jake’s method of teaching and his take on education. He views himself acting as a “doctor” who is trying to help people’s brains without harming them. He firmly believes that while lessons are necessary, the educator must know when they are appropriate. He says “sometimes academic lessons can have negative value for a student, they would have been better off having no lesson at all at that moment, and that the burden of proof is on the intervener in a child’s life to show that the intervention will cause a zero or negative differential in harm.” Jake is a firm believer in the importance of SEL in education research. He believes students must learn to enjoy, to experience, to relax, to live, and to thrive in adult hood. That is not taught in a classroom. He believes that social experiences are every bit as important to a child’s learning as the lessons we present to them. He believes that educators are responsible for achieving a balance that is appropriate to the learner. He even goes so far as to refuse summer tutoring because his experience shows summer students are likely to feel “forced” by their parents to study rather than approaching math as interesting or fun. He worries these feelings lead to reduced retention and negative feelings about learning in general.  

When asked what inspired him to study mathematics at university, Jake explained,

“I was a scared 19-year-old kid with an infant to take care of, and I chose mathematics because it was safe and I was good at it, and most importantly, it wasn’t subject to the opinions of other humans. It was evident to me that mathematics was a subject about truths that transcend culture. I probably understood this before I could articulate it.”

Mathematics made him feel safe because it was a universal truth. Jake learned that he loved mathematics in the 11th grade when he spent a semester in Boston learning from Glenn Stevens. 

“On the first day of lecture, Glenn Stevens asked us, ‘What is an integer?’

Some people said ‘whole numbers’. He nodded, and pointed out that that doesn’t answer the question.  He started asking people to tell him properties of integers.  He began writing properties on the board.  ‘It feels like there is space between them.’  ‘One of them is called zero and it’s special.’ 

Addition.  Zero.  Negatives.  Order.  Probably because I was feeling impatient, I raised my hand.  He was deaf but he had an assistant who would tap his shoulder and transcribe students’ questions for him. I said, ‘But Dr. Stevens, these are all properties of rational numbers, not just integers.’ The woman typed on her keyboard, and he looked at the screen.  Squinted at it. Then, without skipping a single extra beat, scanned the audience with his eyes for my hand while he responded: ‘Well, we have to first distinguish the integers from a walrus.’   

This was an excellent bit of teaching which probably influenced me toward education particularly.  After my question, we proceeded to find the properties of the integers which distinguish them from rational numbers, and thus my question was answered satisfyingly.”

That core memory led Jake to a Bachelor’s, and later a  Ph.D., in mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh. He has since shared his love of mathematics as an Andrew Mellon Research Fellow, a Lecturer, TA, private tutor, and multiple roles in mathematics educational content development. In his work with software development, his expertise in algorithm development has helped to reduce overhead costs of property ownership by a few percentage points in some markets, by selling and integrating better software into those markets. But he considers his roles as an educator, sharing his love of mathematics with his students as “a more important impact that is harder to measure.”  

Like many of us at NWD, Jake is a scientist and a seeker of truth. He treats AI as a developing science, something that has incredible capabilities, and must be studied and implemented wisely:

“Education is a subtle discipline, and I am looking to build software and services that treat the developing brain with the respect it deserves.  I stand ready with scientific impartiality to evaluate whether artificial intelligence has a place in classrooms with children.  My aim is helping children thrive in mathematics classes, and I intend to use any tools that are safe and effective to that end. “