It’s 10 o’clock on a bright Sunday morning at UCLA, but Vivian Moy-Dinson’s students are not your standard campus pupils. Some are in pigtails; a few sport superhero backpacks.
“Rotation,” Moy-Dinson is saying, drawing on the board, “is when a point moves along a circle, but the center stays the same.” The kids chime in.
“Like an orbit,” says one.
“The Earth around the sun!” exclaims another.
The animated kindergartners and first-graders are part of the UCLA Olga Radko Endowed Math Circle, also known as ORMC, a free, weekly enrichment program for gifted K–12 students from a hundred zip codes over the greater Los Angeles area. Think of it as a playground for some of the brightest young minds in the world of mathematics. Established in 2007 as a passion project of the late UCLA math professor Olga Radko, the program serves students united by one common factor: They enjoy math and excel in it.
That’s on clear display in Moy-Dinson’s classroom. Sitting in neat rows behind placards bearing their first names, this group of 17 kids — all around the age of 5 or 6 — follow her lesson as intently as if they were watching a Pixar movie. They brim with confidence — and pose a lot of questions. (“Be brave and ask,” Moy-Dinson encourages the quieter ones.)
Just how many kids in L.A. are willing to spend their Sundays coming to UCLA to do … math? Turns out, a lot. The current number is around 400 — and that simply reflects the number of spaces for enrollment.
Teaching assistant Shimon Schlessinger, 16, helps the kids stay focused, easing them into group work. A high school sophomore who completed AP calculus in the seventh grade, Schlessinger himself is enrolled in ORMC, where he’s exposed to much more advanced coursework than his high school is able to provide — a challenge he relishes. Even during breaks, he and his fellow mathematicians work together on the day’s conundrums.
Schlessinger calls the program’s approach “radically different.” “It provides an amazing sense of community,” he says. “Nowhere else can I find a group of people who share such similar interests — people with whom I can truly be myself.”
The math whiz kids have inherited the Earth — at least in Westwood.
A Center of Gravity
From the beginning, Schlessinger, who was born and raised in L.A., seemed to have an innate sense about numbers. In kindergarten, while the rest of his class was learning to tell time, he lost interest, instead keeping busy by identifying prime numbers in his head. When he was 7, his parents asked him why he liked math so much.
“He said, ‘To me, math is like candy. I can’t get enough of it,’” marvels his father, Evan. “What do you do with a kid like that?”
Enroll him in ORMC, which was created to feed just such hungry young minds. Led at its outset by its late founder, the program is today directed by Oleg Gleizer, Radko’s longtime colleague and a professor in the UCLA Department of Mathematics. The program stems from the tradition of Eastern European math circles, where both scholars came of age, and it offers opportunities to grow mathematically far beyond what is offered in a typical classroom. The work is focused, challenging, intense and — to its many motivated participants — a lot of fun. Courses range from beginner through intermediate and advanced levels; there’s also an offshoot chess club and training for competitions like Math Kangaroo, American Math Competitions and Math Olympiads. Kids thrive on the group work, building self-confidence as well as logic and critical-thinking skills.
Just how many kids in L.A. are willing to spend their Sundays coming to UCLA to do … math? Turns out, a lot. The current number is around 400 — and that simply reflects the number of spaces for enrollment. Some 2,000 more young hopefuls apply every year. Students have to take a qualifying exam to be admitted; those who are accepted are the cream of the academic crop, and most are at the top of their class. “Math circle is like a clubhouse,” says 9-year-old Charlotte Huang. “I really loved it when I went home with a math question that my parents couldn’t answer.”
Down the hall, Gleizer’s office buzzes with activity as parents and students stop by to say hello. Eighty percent of ORMC’s work, he says, is simply getting kids college-ready when it comes to math. “We know what they get at school, and we know what they need to succeed in my classroom, where I teach as a UCLA professor to undergrads,” he says. “We cover the gap.”
He’s being modest. ORMC does much more than that. Gleizer and his colleagues work around the clock to find new ways to engage the kids’ curiosity; at the moment, he’s introducing students to something called “five-dimensional chess with multiverse time travel.” (Don’t ask.) The goal, Gleizer says, is to teach something far grander than equation solving — it’s to allow kids to recognize, and explore, math’s intrinsic beauty.
“Basically, each time you do math, you are building a part of a universe — your own universe,” he says. “And you’ll start looking at things in a very different way.”
Worlds of Possibility
Ten-year-old Ayden Gandhi recently showed friends at school a magic trick he learned at ORMC. He won’t reveal much about it (“A magician never gives away his secrets,” says his delighted mother, Rana), but he allows that it has something to do with binary numbers. And mind reading.
That’s Math Circle for you.
To the untrained eye, ORMC’s wonders really do look like magic. At any given time, the younger students might be cutting up Möbius strips, constructing a hyperbolic soccer ball or learning a secret language through the study of ciphers. By offering a broad range of topics and applications, the program helps them discover what sparks their excitement, as well as what paths they may choose to pursue in the future.
Many of the program’s approximately 1,600 alumni have gone on to MIT, Brown, Yale, Columbia, UCLA, UC Berkeley and other top universities. Alumnus Max Steinberg ’24, M.A. ’24 graduated from UCLA this past June at age 18 with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math. Current students are earning major distinctions, too: Charlotte Huang scored in the top 1% nationwide on the American Math Competition’s AMC 8 exam, a 25-question, 40-minute, multiple-choice test for middle schoolers. Tiger (Qiao) Zhang, 16, received a gold medal in this year’s international Romanian Master of Mathematics competition. Junior high students Atticus Stewart and Elili Flore each received the highly competitive Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship from the Institute for Educational Advancement.
It’s a diverse group. Gleizer says the program makes a concerted effort to support promising students from families with less access to quality education. That commitment began with Radko, who devoted herself to the program before her tragic death from cancer in 2020 at the age of just 45. In one case, a mother who was driving her child from South L.A. couldn’t afford to fill her gas tank each week for the trip to Westwood; ORMC stepped in to pay for it. When another student needed housing near campus, Radko contacted the appropriate offices to help secure resources.
“That was something about Olga: She gave her heart,” says Sierra Chen M.A. ’93, who earned her master’s degree in mathematics at UCLA and now sits on the ORMC steering committee. In 2021, Chen made a major philanthropic gift to endow the program and rename it in Radko’s honor. “She not only developed the program, she went out of her way to help students.”
Satellites on the Move
That wholehearted dedication is shared by the program’s leadership and steering committee, which also includes rock star UCLA math professor Terence Tao — winner of the Fields Medal, otherwise known as the “Nobel Prize in mathematics”; the math department, which Gleizer calls “hugely supportive” in every way; and the numerous volunteers and parents who contribute time and support. And it’s embodied in ORMC’s more than 80 instructors, who include UCLA faculty and an impressive number of current UCLA students.
“Basically, each time you do math, you are building a part of a universe: your own universe.”
— Oleg Gleizer
The Math Circle movement is gaining ground in the U.S., with programs in place at UC Berkeley, Stanford University and other locations. Having a thriving community of student instructors at one of the nation’s top public universities is one particular hallmark of UCLA’s endeavor: Undergraduates gain exposure to new areas of math as they learn to teach, while faculty have the opportunity to mentor and give back. And ORMC’s pupils gain a glimpse into their own potential futures. “We are very lucky,” adds Dimitri Shlyakhtenko, Radko’s husband and ORMC’s steering committee chair, “to have so many students and colleagues at UCLA who share the commitment to excellence in educating the next generation of mathematicians and scientists.”
UCLA’s program is also distinct in its commitment to teaching very young students: Its innovative offerings for kindergarteners make it a standout in the Math Circle community. In fact, in 2015, Radko and Gleizer co-authored a book titled Breaking Numbers Into Parts, which is used in Moy-Dinson’s classes. Now in its second edition, it even got a shout-out in a Washington Post opinion piece for its excellence in “teaching 5- and 6-year-olds serious basic math.” Meanwhile, high school–age ORMC students like Schlessinger benefit from working with the youngest students, in whom they often see their younger selves — another unique aspect of UCLA’s iteration.
The program has received support from the National Science Foundation and other institutions, but it would require significant additional funding to accommodate the hundreds of students the Circle does not currently have the capacity to admit. What Gleizer would like to see happen, he says, is for the Math Circle’s work to spread — and for others to use ORMC’s many publicly available class handouts. Students in the program have already created eight satellite math circles of their own while enrolled in the program, and ORMC offers resources to support them.
It’s all, Gleizer says, the perfect way to get this generation of young people — and those to come — to fall in love with a subject so many of us dreaded in school. “Spread the word,” he emphasizes. “Math is beautiful.
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Fall 2024 issue.