Easy as Pi: PW Talks with Steve Olson

PW: You've made a career as a freelance writer in the biological sciences, but you also help coach your children's middle-school math team in Bethesda, Md. How did you become a math fan?

Steve Olson: As a boy, I read math and logic puzzle books by Martin Gardner and others. That's true as well for the kids on the U.S. math Olympiad team who are in my new book [Count Down]. Typically, their parents gave them books on the subject and they discovered a love of math on their own.

PW: Was it a challenge to sell a book about math to a trade publisher?

SO: It was no problem at all, which surprised me. My editor at Houghton Mifflin, Laura van Dam, was completely receptive to the idea from the very beginning.

PW: Were you advised not to put too many equations into your book?

SO: I was never told to cut down on the math, though we put some of it in an appendix. Houghton Mifflin even typeset the equations well.

PW: How do you promote a book about competitive high school math?

SO: The world of competitive mathematics is larger than most people think. There are thousands of competitions in elementary schools and junior high schools. And each year 400,000 high school kids participate in the initial round of the competitions that culminate in the selection of the six-member U.S. team for the international Olympiad. That's one of the ways I'll be promoting the book, by speaking at various math competitions this spring.

PW: Are there any connections between this book and your previous book, Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins ?

SO:Mapping Human History had some math in it, because math is needed to reconstruct human history from DNA sequences. I hope Count Down gets off to a better start. When the National Book Foundation called me, six months after Mapping Human History was published, to say that it had been nominated for the award, the book hadn't been reviewed by a single newspaper in the United States. I was in despair that the book wasn't getting noticed because I thought it had an important story to tell. It was the first book I know about to explain where races and ethnic groups came from.

PW: How involved were the six students whose path you follow to the 2001 Olympiad in Count Down?

SO: They agreed to let me hang around and pester them with questions, for one thing. Also, the book explains the thought processes the six of them went through to solve each of the six problems at the Olympiad. I needed them to check that I had described correctly how they arrived at their solutions.

PW: You have a son in ninth grade and a daughter in seventh grade who are on their school's math team. Do you see any difference in their levels of interest?

SO: My daughter is just as keen on math as my son. Girls in middle school are often as eager to be on math teams as boys. It's later in middle school, and especially in high school, when they start getting messages that it's not cool for girls to be good at math. In fact, our middle school team recently had a big competition, though our local division includes one of the strongest middle-school teams in the country. But I tell the kids it's like playing basketball against Michael Jordan—it's an experience not many people have.

PW: Have you seen any change in the way math is now taught from when you were in school?

SO: I'm afraid it's still largely rote problem solving. It's so hard to change the culture. Students, teachers and parents are all accustomed to math being taught a particular way in school, even though it's not a very enjoyable or effective way. My math team and I have a lot more fun, and learn lots of math, in competitions.