Boston Globe Spotlights Mathematician and MAA Member Paul Sally

October 23, 2007

Mathematician Paul Sally, 74, an MAA member for more than 40 years, was in Boston in early October when the Boston Globe caught up with him.

Sally, who graduated from Boston College, received his doctorate from Brandeis University and has been at the University of Chicago since 1969. He was slated to give a colloquium lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on supercuspidal representations of p-adic groups. The subject, he told the paper, is something "the average person has no reason to understand." Although he has concentrated in researching reductive groups, an algebraic concept, his passion is teaching. Sally's hallmark, said Philip Kutzko, of the University of Iowa, "is that he nurtures people."

In the 1980s, Sally was the first director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, which created the "Chicago math" program. It stressed K-6 math education through activities such as telling time, counting money, and reading maps. The approach is still a favorite in thousands of classrooms across the country.

Sally went on to create programs that emphasized teaching Chicago teachers how to teach. In 2002, he started a similar program for Massachusetts teachers through the Harvard Extension School.

Teaching, according to Sally, is about getting students to comprehend the problem. "The key at almost every level is knowing enough optional strategies so that if a person doesn't get it, you have a place to go," he said. "You need to be able to change tracks, to have a dozen different ways to teach the same thing."

Despite a host of medical problems, he said, "I'll keep teaching as long as I can find the blackboard."

Source: Boston Globe, Oct. 1, 2007.