text: Olga Radko was the Founding Director of the LAMC (now called the UCLA Olga Radko Endowed Math Circle in her honor). Olga received her Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2002 specializing in Poisson Geometry, and worked in the UCLA department of Mathematics ever since. Olga started LAMC in 2007 and led it until her death in 2020. Please see the In Memoriam page for more information about Olga.
  Swee Hong Chan received his Phd in Mathematics from Cornell University in 2019, and was a member of the UCLA Mathematics Department in 2019--2022 as a Hedrick Postdoc. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Rutgers University, and his primary research area is combinatorics and probability. He has been working with Olga Radko Math Circle since 2020, where he often learns new ways to solve math problems from the students of the circle.
  Sierra Chen obtained her M.A. in Mathematics from UCLA in 1993. She is an entrepreneur in the field of international trade, a leisure artist, an enthusiastic world traveler, and a hopeless optimist. For over two decades, promoting educational excellence has been one of her passions. She taught math classes at community colleges as a part-timer from 1997-2004. While developing her businesses across the continents, she enjoys mentoring students who are eager to learn and thrive.
  Oleg Gleizer is the Director of ORMC. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2001 from Northeastern University, specializing in representation theory and special functions. Oleg sees his mission in inventing ways to present some important parts of modern day Mathematics (and occasionally Physics and Economics), typically reserved for college, to the children from age four and up.
  Dan Hoff received his PhD in Mathematics from UC San Diego in 2016. He began working with the math circle in 2017 and served as Curriculum and Instructional Supervisor from 2018–2021 while researching and teaching as a postdoc in the UCLA Department of Mathematics. His primary mathematical interest is in functional analysis, with a focus on operator algebras and their connections to fields such as ergodic theory and measured group theory.
  Chandrashekhar Khare was born in Mumbai, and studied at Cambridge, Oxford and Caltech, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1995. He worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the University of Utah and is now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prof. Khare’s research is in number theory, especially on the relation between modular forms and Galois representations that underpins Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. In 2008, he and Jean-Pierre Winterberger made a remarkable breakthrough with their proof of a celebrated conjecture of J.P. Serre. Prof. Khare’s honors and awards include the Fermat Prize (2007), Infosys Prize (2010) and the Cole Prize (2011), and he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.
  Doug Lichtman is a Professor of Law at UCLA and has been active in Math Circle for over a decade, first as a father and now as a volunteer instructor. In addition to his work with Math Circle, Doug has coached middle school debate, taught advanced fifth grade math, and is now working with his oldest son to run and expand a weekly Math-Circle-inspired computer coding community for kids, hosted at www.ComeCodeWithUs.com.
  Vivian Moy-Dinson has taught K-5 for the past 17 years and is a Learning Specialist in the Covina Valley Unified School District. She received her Masters with honors in Education from Azusa Pacific University and her Undergrad in Liberal Studies from Cal Poly Pomona University. Vivian joined the LAMC in 2017 and found it so rewarding to see the very young get excited about math in her Breaking Numbers Into Parts (BNP) course. She is a firm believer that all children can learn when given the opportunity and strives each day to challenge and enrich their minds.
  Dima Shlyakhtenko (chair) received his PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley and has been a member of the UCLA mathematics department since 1998. His primary research area is in functional analysis. He was an invited speaker at the 2010 ICM and received multiple awards, including an NSF graduate and postdoctoral fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship and a Clay Math Institute Special Prize. He currently serves as the director of UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics.
  Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1975. He has been a professor of mathematics at UCLA since 1999. Tao's areas of research include harmonic analysis, PDE, combinatorics, and number theory. He has received a number of awards, including the Fields Medal in 2006, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, the Waterman Award in 2008, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015. Terence Tao also currently holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Sciences (Corresponding Member), the National Academy of Sciences (Foreign member), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  Shang-Hua Teng is a University Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at USC with research interests in scientific computing, optimization, game theory, network sciences, and recreational mathematics. He received the 2009 AMS Fulkerson Prize in discrete mathematics, and twice won the ACM Gödel Prize. Citing him as “one of the most original theoretical computer scientists in the world”, the Simons Foundation named him a 2014 Investigator to pursue long-term curiosity-driven fundamental research. For his industry work with Xerox, NASA, Intel, IBM, Akamai, and Microsoft, he received fifteen patents in areas including compiler optimization, Internet technology, and social networks.