MacArthur Fellows, Olympiad gold medalists grieve loss of Berkeley Math Circle | Academics

Evan O’Dorney is, by any metric, a genius. 

At 13 years old, O’Dorney won the 80th Scripps National Spelling Bee and shook hands with then-President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. In 2011, O’Dorney met then-President Barack Obama, this time for winning the Intel Science Talent Search.

Between 2008 and 2011, O’Dorney won two silver and two gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, or IMO. He was a three-time top-five scorer in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, widely considered one of the most prestigious and difficult undergraduate math competitions in the world.

By the time O’Dorney graduated high school, the National Research Council said he “had become as famous for academic excellence as any student can be.”

O’Dorney credits the Berkeley Math Circle, or BMC, for exposing him to these math competitions, which ultimately led to his selection for the U.S. IMO team. 

Now a postdoc in math at Carnegie Mellon University, O’Dorney saidBMC founder and UC Berkeley professor Zvezdelina Stankova was a “great mentor” and prepared him for a career in mathematics. He described the closure of BMC’s flagship program, BMC-Upper, due to “ridiculous” fingerprinting requirements as “such a blow.”

Doris Tsao, a campus professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, shared O’Dorney’s feelings.Originally a professor at Caltech, Tsao, who was awarded the MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant in 2018, heard about BMC from her colleagues and was hoping to enroll her children in the program. 

“We really need some common sense,” Tsao said. “I hope the administration sees the situation for what it is. These students want to learn math and be taught by these amazing guest lecturers around the country who are generously donating their time.” 

University of Toronto professor Gabriel Carroll attended BMC during its first three years. He is a two-time gold medalist at the IMO, once with a perfect score, and a four-time top-five scorer in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. 

Though BMC was beneficial to Carroll’s success in math competitions, he said the most memorable part was the community. 

“BMC opened doors to a wider world of other people with similar interests,” Carroll said in an email. “I lived in Oakland, but I joined a group of friends who carpooled up from the South Bay each week, and we would often go to a cafe and talk for a while after the Circle sessions — and I’ve still been in contact with some of them decades later.”

Carroll said in the email he is “astonished” at the closure of BMC-Upper “by a seemingly minor administrative requirement,” but highlights the accomplishments of the program and its inspiration for many other math circles across the U.S. and Canada. 

Genius Grant recipient and former UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences Chair Claire Tomlin called the program a “jewel” and underscored the role that BMC had in celebrating the “beauty of mathematics and its broad application to many areas.”

Freshman Orhan Hosten-Mittermaier recalls the impact that BMC had on his current studies. As a physics major, he noticed himself using creative approaches to solve problems, which he said he learned at the math circle.

Hosten-Mittermaier shared his appreciation for the structure of BMC, which allowed him to discover the breadth of mathematics that he could learn. 

“Berkeley Math Circle was one of the few places that taught that kind of math in a way that young kids could actually already start to develop mathematical intuition,” Hosten-Mittermaier said. “If I imagine myself growing up without Berkeley Math Circle, I think I would have been a different student.” 

Peter Nofelt, whose child attended BMC-Upper, highlighted that BMC instructors ran their classes as if they were teaching college students, treating students as “people that were able to learn and discuss large topics,” and not just kids.

Current MIT junior and former BMC student Espen Slettnes, for whom minor planet 34379 Slettnes was named after he won first place at the Broadcom MASTERS middle school competition, emphasized how the program has shaped his life. 

“(BMC is) the place where I met my future best friend, and the place that introduced me to Professor (Stankova), whose support and advice throughout my life on numerous other occasions made her, and BMC as a whole, the reason I am where I am today,” Slettnes said in an email. “Its closure is so disheartening.”