Memorial service honored Manjit Bhatia (1936-2020) and the free tutoring program he launched for math students at UMD.

On November 13, 2021, the Bhatia family hosted a memorial service in the James A. Yorke Rotunda of Kirwan Hall at the University of Maryland to celebrate the life and work of Adjunct Professor of Mathematics Manjit Bhatia, who passed away last year at the age of 84. More than a decade ago, Manjit helped launch the department’s advanced mathematics tutoring program. Now known as the Help Sessions program, it helped countless math students take on the biggest challenges in their studies and achieve academic success. 

“Bhatia was a very caring person who loved to help people,” said Mathematics Professor Lawrence Washington. “For several years, he volunteered his time to help students in gateway upper-level courses. Quite often, one-on-one help can remove roadblocks and clear up misconceptions and the students loved his help.”

“A born teacher”

Anyone who met Manjit quickly realized one thing: he was crazy about math. And no matter where he was, whether on campus, at home or just about anywhere else, Manjit never stopped teaching.

“He was passionate about math and he was passionate about learning. We would go on trips and he would start talking to taxi drivers and then advising them, talking about mathematics,” explained Kiran Bhatia, his wife of 53 years. “I would say to him sometimes, ‘Let us just be on vacation now,’ but he was just a born teacher. He would give all of his attention to trying to educate himself or the people around him.”

Born in New Delhi, India, Manjit earned Ph.D.s in computer science and physics, but he especially appreciated the challenges of mathematics. And though he spent years as a computer science professor at Bowie State University, Manjit was also committed to helping young people learn math, especially his son Pravir Bhatia (B.S. ’93, mathematics; B.S. ’93, physics), whose education started early—very early.

“We spent at least an hour a day from when I was 2 years old till high school,” Pravir recalled. “My father gave me all the tools to succeed in mathematics and I was doing calculus by ninth grade. He wouldn’t let you get away without knowing stuff.”

Pravir, who now runs part of a quantitative trading strategy for one of the world’s top hedge funds at D.E. Shaw Group, understood even that that there was more to those nightly math sessions than just solving problems.

“I think the important thing was how much he loved it,” Pravir said. “I remember when I was doing it, I mean I wasn’t great at it, I was good, but just the smile on his face when I absorbed a concept kept me going. He was a crazy fun person to learn from.”

“Everybody’s teacher”

Manjit taught college students. He taught kids in the neighborhood. He even taught mathematics to relatives’ children when he went home to India for visits. Yet he never seemed to run out of passion or energy for the task.

“He was everybody’s teacher,” Pravir said. “I have friends who knew that when they came over and spent the night, they were going to get drilled on their math. Many years later, they would tell me how tough and intimidating those sessions were, but also how good they were from a learning perspective.”

By 2008, Manjit retired from Bowie State University, but he still wanted to teach. So, he came to College Park and offered his help. 

“My memory is that after he retired from Bowie, he contacted the department and offered to provide free tutoring,” Washington said. “The department gave him an office and he got started.”

Manjit was off and running—almost. Before he started one-on-one tutoring with students, he wanted to make sure he was prepared.

“He would actually go attend classes so he could help students taking those courses,” Kiran explained.

That’s how Manjit met Mathematics Professor Denny Gulick.

“Before he would tutor, he audited my MATH410 class on advanced calculus, and that is where I got to know him,” Gulick explained. “He thought that having tutoring sessions available could help students taking that class—the most rigorous undergraduate math class—which all math majors must take and pass. He was anxious to help students and after he felt that he was prepared well enough, that is when he started the Help Sessions. Toward the end of his time at UMD, he took and fell in love with MATH406: Introduction to Number Theory. Then, he taught it a few times himself.”

Solving problems “at all hours”

Even when he was in his 70’s and 80’s, Manjit never missed a chance to help solve a problem. 

“He got emails all the time from students trying to solve problems,” Kiran explained. “Sometimes they came at 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in the morning and he would start working on them at 4 a.m. By 2019, when you could find answers on the internet, there were still people emailing him at all hours asking him to help them solve problems, and he did. He was the person who got up at 5 in the morning to do problem sets till he was 83 years old.”

Manjit’s passion for mathematics and teaching touched many lives, on campus and beyond—more than even his wife realized.

“One of our friends’ kids—he’s grown now—came to my husband’s funeral service and he said to me, ‘Oh, he taught me so much,’” Kiran recalled. “And I said, ‘When? You never took a class from him.’ And he said, ‘No, but when he came to our house, he would always come to see me and give me something to do like a math puzzle or a mathematics problem to solve.’ I didn’t even know that. He would just engage people wherever he went.”

A gift for the future

In 2015, a few years before Manjit passed away, he and his wife created the Help Sessions Endowed Fund, making a gift to the Department of Mathematics to help keep his free tutoring program alive. 

“We discussed it, and he said if something happened to him, he wanted the program to continue,” Kiran said.

Pravir hopes his father’s passion for mathematics and his commitment to helping students succeed will be remembered for years to come. And with continued support for the Help Sessions Endowed Fund, Pravir believes the free tutoring work that was so important to his dad will keep making a difference.

“I’ve put money in, my friends and my company put money in, too, and I hope others will as well,” Pravir said, “because that’s all my father ever wanted, to keep this going.” 

He wanted to provide help and support for any mathematics student who needs it—now and for years to come.

“Despite wearing a turban, my father was never much into ritual or gatherings—so in a way hosting an event for him with friends, family and colleagues is a bit ironic,” Pravir reflected. “It never would have occurred under his watch. Maybe, when my father is looking down from far above, he’ll be happy that people got together and did this in the Math rotunda—his true temple.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Award established thanks to the generous support of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Ivo Babuška and his wife Renata.

The Ivo and Renata Babuška Endowed Student Award for Graduate Research in Mathematics was recently established at the University of Maryland thanks to the generous support of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Ivo Babuška and his late wife Renata. The merit-based award recognizes outstanding Ph.D. student dissertations in the field of computational mathematics in the Department of Mathematics.

Babuška was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1926. He and Renata and their two young children immigrated to the United States in 1968. Babuška was a professor in UMD’s Department of Mathematics and Institute for Physical Science and Technology from 1968 until his retirement in 1994. He and Renata then moved to Austin, Texas. After Renata passed away in 2020, Babuška moved near his son's family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

UMD played an important role in Babuška's successful career. With his colleagues, especially Professors Bruce Kellogg, John Osborn and Bert Hubbard, Babuška established the foundations of his scientific contributions in the field of computational mathematics, specifically numerical methods for solving partial differential equations. The proofs of the Babuška-Lax-Milgram Theorem and the inf-sup theorem, which became known as the Babuška-Brezzi condition, were two of his contributions while at UMD. These theorems became the foundation of the convergence of the finite element method of solving the partial differential equations. During his career, Babuška published more than 350 papers, books and book chapters. His work has been cited more than 65,000 times. He also received numerous honors and awards. 

In 1970, Babuška founded the Finite Element Circus and served as the "ringmaster" while he was at UMD. The Circus is an annual, informal regional meeting held at different East Coast universities. The meeting allows researchers to share new results and works in progress related to finite elements. An innovative aspect of the Circus is that presentations are scheduled at random to encourage discussions among young and established researchers. The 50th Circus was held virtually in 2020. 

The Ivo and Renata Babuška Endowed Student Award for Graduate Research in Mathematics was created to encourage the next generation of engineers and scientists in computational mathematics at UMD. The inaugural Babuška Award winner will be announced this month. 

Sophomore math major Marie Brodsky finds a different way to teach children math.

Marie Brodsky found her passion for mathematics by going in circles—math circles. Originating in Eastern Europe, math circles spread to the United States in the 1990s, where they found Brodsky in 2006. From the age of 4, Brodsky participated in these extracurricular math learning experiences and her love for problem-solving grew from there. 

By the time Brodsky was 11 years old, she was leading a math circle of her own—teaching younger children foundational math and problem-solving skills through something she calls “recreational math.”

“I still can’t believe that all these parents allowed this little girl with pigtails and polka-dot clothing to teach their kids,” the sophomore math major at the University of Maryland recalled with a laugh. “But I think they recognized that their kids would have a lot more fun learning from someone just slightly older than them rather than a serious adult.”

Brodsky came to UMD as a Banneker/Key Scholar in the Honors College’s Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students (ACES) program—and she was looking for an opportunity to continue teaching when she found the Student Initiated Courses (STICs) program. 

STICs help students design, develop and teach their own courses under the guidance of faculty advisors. This year, Brodsky is the executive director of the program, and this fall she taught MATH299Y: Teaching Math to a Young Audience. The course curriculum is inspired by Brodsky’s experience tutoring through her platform Conversations in Math during the pandemic, when she taught math virtually to dozens of children around the world. 

“I took a lot of notes on what worked well and how to explain certain resources I’d found on all those topics,” Brodsky said. “To put together the curriculum for MATH299Y, I went through my lesson notes, picked out the topics I thought were most interesting and put them in logical order for the semester.”

MATH299Y makes connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts and introduces topics typically not covered in elementary school curricula—helping college students take advanced topics and simplify them to understand their core ideas. Brodsky anticipates that students will come away with a stronger foundation in math and greater confidence in their abilities to break down these concepts for a young audience.

“I want my students to feel why math can be exciting,” Brodsky said. “Then, when they go on to teach, they remember that these connections between concepts are exciting and see how they can frame them in a more interesting way.”

In each class, Brodsky diagrams problems on the blackboard and guides her students to solutions. She poses math problems geared toward children ages 4, 8 and 12 and asks her students how they would break them down for younger audiences. Brodsky frequently asks, “But why?” to help the students dig deeper into these core mathematical concepts.

For example—a frog is jumping back and forth over a stream. It jumped 101 times. Which side did it end up on? 

“It’s not obvious. What’s your first reaction?” Brodsky said to her class. “In the end, it’s equivalent to having done one jump. If you are teaching 4-year-olds, I would totally act this out by having students jump back and forth in the classroom.”

“I think Marie has done an excellent job understanding what skill sets the various age groups have and how her examples apply or don't apply to those various age groups,” said Mathematics Principal Lecturer Justin Wyss-Gallifent, Brodsky’s faculty advisor for MATH299Y. “In teaching, knowing how to structure the material is probably more than half the battle. In Marie’s case, she is not just teaching problems but also understanding how those age groups would approach the problems.”

Wyss-Gallifent explained that learning to break down problems for others and developing public speaking skills are just some of the benefits of teaching a STIC. Additionally, undergraduate students connect with content differently when another undergrad is teaching the course.

“It’s definitely different having an undergrad student in a professor role. Marie really knows what she’s doing,” said Shiraz Robinson, a plant biology major and one of Brodsky’s students. “This class has given me a different way to look at numbers and it’s helping me understand math better. You can scale these ideas to very deep ideas that require all your computational power.”

In her role as executive director of the STICs program, Brodsky wants to give the students teaching STICs creative license to teach the topics they’re passionate about while also holding them accountable as teachers.

“We’re planning to do workshops where the facilitators give each other feedback on their course planning, content, syllabus, maybe teach a little bit to each other and get feedback,” Brodsky said. “Most people who are teaching a STIC are really committed to this idea of students teaching courses, so we want to support them and give them even more resources to become even better teachers.”

When it comes to her future career plans, Brodsky is still figuring that out. For now, she’s interested in learning more about education policy and curriculum development. One thing she’s certain of: She wants to make education better.

“I want to help improve the education system,” Brodsky said, “and revamp how teachers get incentivized to teach in better ways, how they decide the material and curriculum, and how to make the experience better on a larger scale.”

Written by Katie Bemb