Andy Engelward (1966-2025)

I'm sad to hear that Andy Engelward has passed away recently. I know Andy since December 1999, when I came here to interview for the teaching position I'm still working in. Andy had already been teaching as preceptor at the department together with John Boller and Robert Winters. With me, also John Mackey and Dale Winter joined in 2000. I owe Andy a lot over the last two decades and illustrate this with a few short aspects. Here is a extension school faculty spotlight featuring Andy in 2024:

First years

Andy played an important part for getting us started and prepping about what would await. I came in December 17 1999 to give a talk at the math table, was taken to the math question center (MQC) which had been located in Loker commons in the lower part of Annenberg. I also enjoyed a brunch on Sunday morning at Leveret house. And then I was briefed by Andy, Robert and John about the job. They told me about the set-up and what to expect as this was not a generic work. They especially stressed that teaching is only a small part of a wide variety of tasks which are attached to the position. But the mix of teaching, administration and technology was just perfect to me. The picture to the right is from about 2001. Robert Winters who was at the department longer than Andy and John had just moved to teach at Wellesley college. See photos from an event in Fall 2000 at Leverett house and Fotos from a potlock in Arlington, September 2003

Social at the Leverett house (Howard Georgi and Danny Goroff had been hosting) John Mackey left, Andy Engelward middle and Robin Gottlieb right	Photo 2001:(Left to right, standing: Andy Engelward, Daniel Goroff, James Propp (visiting), John Mackey. left to right sitting: John Boller, Oliver Knill, Susan Milano (calculus office) and Dale Winter.

The preceptor book

For over a decade, new preceptors got handed the "preceptor book", which described parts of what we would do. Andy was the initial author of the ``preceptor book". I converted it around 2003 to SGML, a minimal markup language which allowed immediate export to other document formats like latex or html. Here is the PDF (containing the start and end only). Of course, things have changed much since. For example, the team has become larger and also changed management twice since Danny Goroff had started it.

Teaching

Math for teaching program

Andy had been pivotal building up the math for teaching program at the extension school. It had been long in the planning. Danny Goroff originally drafted some early versions (with the aim to have it at the Math department but these proposals i.e. NSF proposals that all required substantial financial support were rejected). The extension school in the end had the resources to pull it off. In 2010, Andy asked me to teach start a course "Teaching math from a historical perspective" at the extension school. This was one of the greatest things I could do. Teaching this course allowed me to grow. While Andy was director and later assistant director, I think Andy always also had been a strong support for me personally, allowing me to teach there. And this for more than a decade. The director of course influences directly the student decision to take which course and with Andy gone from the top, also my course eventually got too small to be run. Initially, all these classes were done on campus (which had been lots of fun and rewarding), then came a hybrid teaching which was less ideal because especially in the fall with early snow, students would no more drive in but take the remote option. Then came Zoom (I think having been the first in the department teaching with zoom. The extension school had provided me with a personal trainer to get started). During the pandemic, everything was done via zoom and that remained. I always missed the direct personal contact to the students. Teaching online and teaching in person are completely different things. I think Andy also had been pivotal that allowed me to insist that I could continue to teach the math s 21a course in person. Math 21b already has moved to a hybrid version (which I personally do not believe in for various reasons). Now, from 2025 on, math s 21a will also move to a hybrid version, that is no more with me.

Master thesis advising

An other thing which Andy had been a blessing, that he managed to pair me with talented students who write a thesis. I learned enormously during such projects like with Jose Ramirez Herran on 360 computer vision, Elizabeth Slavlovsky, on 3D printing Paul Hermany on Math Puzzles and Activities or Ethan Fenn on Proofs in teaching mathematics. Andy organized also "Summerschool events" during various summers. There were various speakers or movies. Andy during his tenure organized for years such events: I once talked there about 360 degree computer vision: (slides from that Summer 2007). Maybe I should add that personal relations was always important to Andy. When he was handling course assistants (at that time, the job of hiring a 100 or more course assistants was done by one preceptor, additionally to all other things like teaching and administration), he would also organize socials. He once invited all faculty and CAs to games on the Allston fields. I remember that very well, because first of all as a Swiss, I was playing soccer and not football and even have difficulty throwing the football singular shape, (even so a surface of revolution). I'm better in soccer (Hier is our team in second grade in a tournament) but I injured my hand during a game with the younger and stronger Math course assistants on the Allston field. I still remember one of the CAs there (Gregg Musiker who is now sat the University of Minnesota and who was also playing then. Also at the extension school, Andy organized events for the teachers, either in the extension school building or in restaurants.

Math Circle

For probably more than a decade, Andy organized and taught the math circle at Northeastern, which ran parallel to the one organized by Bob Kaplan at Harvard. The Northeastern Sunday morning events were targeted for older kids, most of them high school level. I myself gave several talks there: like in November 2003 about Billiards, in May 2004 about Fashion in mathematics, in April 2005 about Diophontine equations, on April 1 2007 about Mathematics and AI or on December 2, 2007 about Perfect Numbers or December 6, 2009 about Polyhedra and Polytops or on April 1, 2012 about Geometry of networks. These events were extremely important for me personally since it was a time when I had been looking for new math pastures to work on. That Andy run this Sunday morning program and invited me to speak allowed me to grow into other areas of mathematics.

Outreach to Texas

Andy had been great to build a partnership with the Texas Graduate Center. He managed to get very good relations with the leadership there and do exchanges. Andy has arranged that I could give a workshop there on the adventure of teaching algebra. He also invited many students from that program to Harvard. I met these teachers once early during a lunch that Andy organized at Annenberg Hall. Later, many of these students would be in my "Teaching Math with a Historical Perspective" class or in a Summer school class. I have many fond memories from these exchanges and learned a lot from teachers working in the trenches. By building such connections, Andy enriched the math for teaching program.

Technology in the classroom

Andy asked me also regularly to give guest lectures in his courses, especially the capstone courses. His vision was to show teachers about the possibilities which technology produce. In the end in the year 2022 the slideshow has grown to 350 slides. But I would always also tell about something which was new. Typically, these events would motivate me to write a little program: Example: Cellular automata, or to write a story about the Middlesex canal, a topic in which Robert Winters, also a former preceptor is a champion. See his website. Over more than a decade, I was giving such guest lecture in Andy's cap stone course. Until the pandemic, this was mostly in person, during the pandemic and after, it has moved to zoom. I had always been looking forward to meet Andy there and also see him teach. Even so I was only a short time usually in the classroom when he taught, I learned a lot from it. He would for example discuss the movie "Stand and Deliver" in a class. I learned from that movie later the Tic-Tac-Toe method for integration by parts.