Academics Jean-Martin Albert - Mathematics Fellow

Jean-Martin Albert is an enthusiastic teacher with experience teaching math courses and tutoring students, and is well prepared to teach mathematical concepts to students coming from a wide variety of backgrounds.  He comes to Marlboro after working in several Canadian provinces, and is looking forward to collaborating with logicians in New England and New York.

Teaching Philosophy

From his experience as a math teacher and teaching assistant for all levels of undergraduate courses, Jean-Martin has learned that many students, especially in introductory courses, are intimidated by mathematics, and view the material as abstract and tedious.  He says, "I try to show them that mathematics can be fun and useful, and most often, especially at the introductory level, not very far removed from reality.  My enthusiasm plays a big part in the process."

Jean-Martin believes that "the best way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics, and a big part of doing mathematics is solving problems.  I try to show the students that each formula and each theorem is the answer to a particular question, whether the question came from the real world or is mathematics for its own sake."  He also notes that discussion and teamwork are an important part of learning mathematics.  "Each student will see a problem in a slightly different light, and so each will consider a different approach to the solution."  He then asks students to try to explain to him or to other students how they arrive at a solution, in order to help them internalize and remember the solution they found.  He also encourages mistakes: "I want the students to fall into traps, make mistakes, and learn to see exactly where they made the mistake, and how to recover from it."

Scholarly Activities

Jean-Martin is interested in mathematical logic, more specifically continuous model theory and its applications to functional analysis.  This is a new and exciting area of mathematical logic, which has applications to many other mathematical areas such as algebra, topology, functional analysis, p-adic analysis and probability.

Selected Conference Presentations

"Strong Conceptual Completeness for First-Order Continuous Logic."  North American Annual Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, March 2010.

"Introduction to Continuous Logic." 2nd Pure and Applied Mathematics Graduate Student Conference, October 2008.

"Introduction to Forcing." Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, July 2002.

B.Sc., McGill University, 2002; M.Sc., University of Calgary, 2004; Ph.D., McMaster University, 2011; Marlboro College, 2011 -