Katherine Adebola Okikiolu, Twenty-First Century Mathematician (Grades 6-12)

Katherine (Kate) Adebola Okikiolu is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Among many mathematical interests, Okikiolu is investigating a famous question that was posed by mathematicians as far back as 1966: Can you hear the shape of a drum? In other words, do different-shaped drums produce different sounds?

Okikiolu explains at her web site (see the "Ready-to-Go" Activities section below) that the mathematicians who contemplated this question were thinking about a specific set of drums, known as planar (two-dimensional) drums. You can make a simple planar drum by bending a wire into a loop of any shape (which in essence means you can have a limitless number of drum shapes) as long as you can place the loop flat on a table and pull a drum skin taut across the loop. This introduces the question: Can two differently shaped drums make the same sound?

While, in itself, this is a fascinating area of research, Okikiolu is taking this research to another dimension--literally. She is investigating drums of higher dimension which cannot be built in our three-dimensional world. These drums are useful in modeling physical variables such as velocity, energy, time, and magnetic fields.

Not surprisingly, even as a child, Okikiolu was interested in exploring ideas. Born in 1965 in Great Britain, Okikiolu is the second daughter of a research mathematician father and a mathematics teacher mother. When asked about her childhood, Okikiolu describes herself as inquisitive and interested in many things. "One of the things most fascinating to me was sunshine, and the colored diffractions patterns you can make with it by looking at it through half-closed eyes. I planned to find a way to reproduce that pattern exactly so that everyone could see it on cloudy days."¹

As a youngster, Okikiolu viewed "mathematics in the category of mysterious and extraordinary things in the realm of fairy tales with quests for unusual items and highly improbable coincidences. However, the crucial difference that distinguished mathematics from other mysterious things was that my parents believed in it!"² Between the ages of 10 and 14, Okikiolu learned mathematics by reading good mathematics books and got ahead in mathematics by studying on her own.

Much to her disappointment, Okikiolu did not get accepted into her first two choices of colleges at Cambridge University. The rejections dampened her determination--but only for a matter of weeks. If she couldn't go to Cambridge, she would go somewhere else! Just as she was refocusing her plans, she was presented with an opportunity to study at Newnham College, also part of Cambridge. Becoming a student there in 1983, she found this women's college to be a supportive environment in which to live and to study mathematics. It was at Newnham that she did her undergraduate work.

Okikiolu's achievements and honors include earning a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles and doing postdoctoral work at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study and MIT. In 1997, she was awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship and was a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. In 2001, she became the first black woman to publish an article in the Annals of Mathematics, a journal of research papers in pure mathematics founded in 1884. As a research mathematician, Okikiolu has achieved success and contributed to the development of mathematical ideas in the twenty-first century.

Just how does a research mathematician work on mathematics problems? According to Dr. Okikiolu, "Our problems tend to be more open-ended than the problem sets we give out to students, and working on a problem is more exciting when you know that nobody has solved it or that you are the first person to really think about it. Also, they can take years to solve."³

In response to the question of where she sees her career progressing in the next 10 to 20 years, Okikiolu answered just the way you'd expect a research mathematician to answer: "That remains to be seen, but there are a number of interesting mathematical problems which I hope to solve."⁴

¹Kate Okikiolu's Home Page, http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~okikiolu/projects/
²Kate Okikiolu's Home Page, http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~okikiolu/projects/
³Personal correspondence, Dec. 28, 2001.
⁴Personal correspondence, Dec. 25, 2001.

Connections

You can use the story of this world-class research mathematician to show that mathematics is more than formulas and computations--it's an open-ended and exciting field of study. And you can discuss Dr. Okikiolu's work to launch an exploration into how mathematics is involved in the study of sound in physics or music classes.

Web Resources

1. Information about Me and My Work
   
   http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~okikiolu/projects/index.html
   Dr. Okikiolu has put together a web site with answers to some of the questions that she receives about her background and work.
   
   
2. ThePosterProject
   
   http://www.math.sunysb.edu/posterproject/www/index.html
   Using visual images to challenge stereotypes, the site focuses on changing the intellectual and emotional climate surrounding the idea of scientific research in order to increase the number of women and girls who choose to pursue careers related to mathematics and the physical sciences, and to retain, at the high school and university level and beyond, women who have already chosen such careers.
   
   
3. You Can't Always Hear the Shape of a Drum
   
   http://www.ams.org/new-in-math/hap-drum/hap-drum.html
   Here you can read about how mathematicians have approached finding the answer to the question: Can you hear the shape of a drum?
   
   
4. ThePosterProject Biographies: Kate Adebola Okikiolu
   
   http://www.math.sunysb.edu/posterproject/www/biographies/okikiolu.html
   Here's ThePosterProject's biography of Okikiolu.
   
   
5. The Faces of Science: African Americans in Science
   
   http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/faces.html
   From this site you can link to information on African Americans in science in the past, the present, and the future. The home page provides access to an alphabetical index of famous African American scientists and to bibliographies for research on African Americans in science and technology.
   
   
6. Black Women in Mathematics
   
   http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/wmad0.html
   This site presents the history and current accomplishments of black women in the field of mathematics.
   
   
7. Results of the 2001 AWM Essay Contest: Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics
   
   http://awm-math.org/biographies/contest/2001.html
   To read about other women mathematicians, check out the 2001 results of a biography writing contest sponsored by Association for Women in Mathematics. Students from elementary to graduate school contributed essays about the lives of contemporary women mathematicans. Also, see the About the Contest section to find out about the next contest.
   
   

Ready-to-Go Activities

1. Can You Hear the Shape of a Drum?
   
   http://math.ucsd.edu/~okikiolu/projects/drum.html
   Part of Dr. Okikiulo's Home Page, this site includes an activity that introduces the exploration of drum sounds.
   
   
2. Classroom Activities on Carol Gordon's Drums
   
   http://www.cs.appstate.edu/~sjg/ncctm/activities/carolyndrum.html
   An activity for exploring area and perimeter of two mathematical drums.
   
   

Classroom Resources from the ENC Collection

1. African and African American women of science
   Featured in ENC Focus  
   Date: 1998 Grade(s): 5 - 12 Cost: $7.95 - $21.99 ENC#: 016202
   This book, part of the Women in Science series for students in grades 5 to 12, explores the scientific contributions of 15 African or African American women and describes representative scientific concepts from their fields. The series offers positive multicultural, female role models with biographical sketches that outline the social and economic challenges that female scientists have had to overcome to succeed in their fields. Each book in the series presents timelines of the women's lives and hands-on activities that relate to their area of specialization. The careers highlighted in this book include medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, and environmental studies.
   (For more details see ENC Record)
   
   
   

Teacher Resources from the ENC Collection

1. Perspectives on gender
   Date: 2001 Grade(s): K - 12 Cost: $23.95 ENC#: 020656
   This book is a thoughtful exploration of gender equity in mathematics. Nineteen essays approach gender issues in mathematics in a variety of ways--for example, in terms of psychosocial aspects, assessment of achievements, personal experiences recounted by African American and Latina women, and intervention programs that can be implemented to support talented female students.
   (For more details see ENC Record)
   
   
   
2. The equity equation: fostering the advancement of women in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering
   Date: 1996 Grade(s): 6 - Post-Sec. Cost: $45.00 ENC#: 017148
   This book presents the findings and recommendations of researchers and practitioners concerning women in science, engineering, and mathematics. The authors examine findings about the barriers women and girls encounter at every level, from K to 12 educational experiences to studies of women scientists' employment and success in industry, and conclude that the most significant barriers are institutional rather than personal.
   (For more details see ENC Record)
   
   
   

Search Strategies

Find more materials by searching Curriculum Resources on ENC Online using these terms: Mathematical modeling, Mathematicians, or Sound.

Connections to Standards

Realizing that there are many ways to use this Classroom Calendar entry, we chose these standards because they relate to the entry, in full or in part. If you want to explore the standards further, please use the link(s) provided.

Connections to NCTM Standards
Connections: Recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics
Geometry: Use visualization, spatial reasoning, and geometric modeling to solve problems
Problem Solving: Solve problems that arise in mathematics and in other contexts