The Magic of Math

As a professor, perhaps his most important audience is his own students. He takes teaching seriously â€" he has been honored with a University System of Georgia Regents Teaching Excellence Award and, earlier in his career, the Georgia Tech CETL/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Award â€" but not so seriously that he can’t find a place for magic in the classroom. He likes to incorporate tricks into his teaching and surprise students with magic in class.

“I pretty much always have a deck of cards on me,” he said.

He also brings the magic of mathematics to high school students by teaching a distance learning course on number theory and cryptography. The course, in its second year, was developed to give high school students who have completed Tech’s Distance Calculus sequence a way to continue their math education with Tech.

“Some of these students are only juniors in high school, but they’ve already completed multivariable calculus,” said Baker, who also designed the number theory course. “We could have done differential equations or something else that would continue the calculus series, but I wanted to do something different to show them that math is more than just calculus.”

Baker enjoys performing, of course, but he incorporates magic into his lessons with students in mind, striving to make his videos on mathematics as stimulating as those he once used to learn magic.

“As professors, it’s good for us to look at how we can be more engaged in the classroom,” he said. “Students like it. Ideally, the word will get out that Tech is a fun place to be, and maybe I can have something to do with that.”