About Ben

BEN BLUM-SMITH has spent the last 9 years teaching and studying the teaching of mathematics. He graduated from Yale University and obtained a Masters in Teaching Mathematics from Tufts University before teaching for 6 years in the public schools of Boston, Cambridge, and New York City. He has worked as a private tutor for students from age 8 to adulthood, in topics ranging from multiplication and fractions to calculus, combinatorics and analytic number theory. Since 2007 he has worked as a consultant to the AP Calculus program at East Side Community High School in Manhattan.

Ben formed Blum-Smith Mathematics in 2007 to house his tutoring practice but soon envisioned a broader scope of activities and began to lead workshops designed to make the delight of math accessible to a wider audience. In addition to workshops offered under the auspices of Blum-Smith Mathematics, in the summer of 2008 he taught a two-week course of this kind at the Little Red Schoolhouse/Elizabeth Irwin High School Summer Institute, and has given lectures at the New York Math Circle and Courant SPLASH.

Ben's own serious study of mathematics began when he was still in grade school. After some chance events in the fourth grade led him to learn the fundamentals of algebra, he began to learn calculus from his father's college textbook in the fifth grade, and while in high school studied multivariable calculus and linear algebra at night at Harvard Extension School. At Yale, he studied mathematical physics, fractal geometry, real analysis, discrete math and combinatorics. During the pursuit of his teaching degree, he studied abstract algebra at Northeastern University and probability theory at Boston University. More recently he has studied Galois theory and commutative algebra at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. His dedicated study of mathematics outside of a formal context also continues, both informing and inspiring his practice as an educator.

Contact: ben@blumsmithmath.com