Joe Erickson
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Bucks County Community College


Mathematics isn't a very popular subject. No, seriously—the statement is based on years of empirical evidence I've gathered inside the classroom and out. It seems to be just one of those constants of the universe, like death, taxes, and the way in which a cat, when about to heave up a hairball, will shun linoleum and make for a pristine carpet. Truly, if you want to elicit strong emotions from someone, nothing turns the trick better than exposing them to pure, impeccable, infuriatingly unassailable logic. Mathematics is based on logic, which is another subject that never wins mainstream beauty contests and can even be a liability when wielded in a political arena. But as Spock said in Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country: "Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end." And so, to see the "point" of logic, one must put it in perspective as the first step toward greater riches. It takes a lot of patience to get "good" at logic and, by extension, mathematics. I should know, because mathematics was my worst subject up until my junior year in high school. I'm not a "natural" with numbers, really, nor particularly smart as many people assume when I tell them I teach math.
    math 120: college algebra    
    math 140: calculus 1    
    math 250: differential eq.    

I had to get turned on to astronomy (when I saw Halley's Comet and Saturn through a telescope) before I found a reason to apply myself in math, and then I had to work my butt off for countless hours to become proficient in basic algebra and geometry. And it must be admitted: math is a lot easier to learn when you have some kind of motivation to learn it. It's not about being a genius. Of course, if there's anything less popular than mathematics as a subject, it's studying the applications mathematics has in the real world by doing (drumroll...) word problems! When I was a freshman in high school, the only thing I dreaded more than word problems was the prospect of a nuclear holocaust. What can I say, except that the only way you get better at word problems is to pound away at them, stumble and fall, get back up, and pound away at them some more. Now here I am today, teaching mathematics. And I don't deny that I like to teach it the old-fashioned way, with lectures that distill concepts down to their essential ingredients and then work out lots of examples step-by-step. The problem with many mathematics textbooks is they are too wordy and cluttered, generally because they try to be all things to all people and meet the diverse curriculum requirements of innumerable colleges and universities across the nation.

A native Californian, I double-majored in mathematics and physics (with a minor in chemistry) at California State University, Long Beach. After earning my B.S. I went on to graduate school where I successfully postponed entering the "real world" for a few more years and obtained an M.S. in Applied Mathematics. Then in 2000 A.D. I moved out to Pennsylvania and taught part-time at Montgomery County Community College until I joined the BCCC faculty as a full-time instructor in 2002, teaching anything from Math 090 (arithmetic) to Math 250 (differential equations). These days I stick largely to teaching Math 101, 102, 120, 140, 141, 242, and 250. Aside from teaching I've held down other odd jobs over the years: I sold churros and popcorn at Disneyland for a summer, did a stint as a "flex-force engineer" at Boeing, worked in a Swiss packaging facility for a few months, and was briefly a lab assistant at the University of Tennessee Space Institute. Oh, and as a kid I sometimes sold pomegranates door to door for two bits apiece and once rose to the rank of assistant manager of a roadside lemonade stand.

I still take classes in mathematics and try to learn new things. Over the past couple of years I've taken four courses (one per semester) at the University of Pennsylvania. Last summer I learned to use LaTeX, a document markup language and preparation system that is almost universally used to typeset scientific and mathematical publications, including most math textbooks. Now I'm spending the 2009 - 2010 academic year taking courses in analysis and algebra at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University while studying topology on my own when time allows. This will push plans to become a rock star or even an eccentric beach-comber onto the back burner, I fear, but may put me in a better position to get a Ph.D. in mathematics a few years down the road. We'll see. I'm perfectly happy having math as a hobby, and just don't know if I'd have the patience for the whole "publish or perish" scene.

At the top of this page there is a quote, usually related to mathematics, that changes at random with each visit. (So now you have a motivation to come back here again and again and again!) Many of the quotes are humble or self-deprecating, but a few others are quite arrogant sounding and seem to suggest that a life without mathematics is not worth living. Arrogant mathematicians are as much a fact of life as mad scientists and nutty professors, but by and large they are mostly harmless and usually misunderstood.