Under Construction

Interview with Kate Okikiolu about the Math4Life  video.

March 3,  2026

Q.   So it’s 20 years now since you finished the Math4Life video.   How many people have seen the video up to this point?

Kate.   Well at this point I think that at least 50 people have seen it.    All the eight plus professors who contributed their interviews to the video were sent a copy.   The school in Compton California that participated in the video was sent a copy.  The National Science Foundation that paid around one hundred thousand to have me make the video instead of my teaching my classes at UCSD was sent 2 copies.     UCSD was given two copies that vanished from my file in the department office. 

Then  I sent letters out to the school kids who participated in the video and those who replied and  wanted a copy were sent a copy of the video.   The LA dance group that was contracted for three grand was given a copy as well.    I personally showed it to a few undergraduates and I held a showing before it was finished for faculty at UCSD which was very poorly attended. 

Q.   What kind of feedback did you get from the video?

Kate.    People didn’t like it and apart from the mathematicians who gave beautiful interviews,  most people  did not seem to be enthusiastic about having a foreigner come here and make a video about them.

  Most particularly my colleagues did not like the video.   I was about the only person who really loved the video.    It combined amazing dance performances by a group from LA that had just toured London.   A friend of mine who was the lawyer handling their concerts over there put me in touch with them.    However,  my colleagues could not understand what the dancing  had to do with the rest of the video.

 The other elements in the video were African American and Mexican American mathematicians  talking about their careers,  what their math is used for,   the struggles they went through to get through college and become professionals,   and achievements they had made for the country.   Then the main part of the video was middle school kids explaining money sums involving negative money which is debt.  This theme was used to explain the rules of the addition and subtraction of negative numbers.   My colleagues thought it made no sense to combine such disparate elements together in a video,  and now I know the culture better I can begin to understand what was bothering them.   In particular they hated the fact that the dance was in the video since the dancers were not doing much mathematics.   They thought that was really confusing.

Q.   Why did you not put the video on the web?

Kate.   It was all quite a lot of work to make the 45 minute video.  It involved two years of my time  and it involved a lot of people several of whom were contracted and paid on the grant.  All of that time I was making the video,  I was using grant money to pay my salary instead of teaching my classes of between 30 and 200 students a time.    Therefore I was quite keen to put the video up on the web to show my work.   

However,  after I finished the video around 2004, after three years of extending the grant because I would work on it for one quarter at a time,    I was told by my grants administrator that it would need to go through a  human subjects review.     That was because it contained children under the age of 18.      Then they basically just held on to the video for several years until after the kids all left school.     The UCSD administration had been quite discouraging about the video and some senior faculty had told me not to waste my time trying to make a video even though they knew that I had said on my grant that I would make a video.    After holding on to the video for years,  UCSD  gave it back without further comment and said that it did not violate the human subjects laws and that was all.     

When finally UCSD after three or four years told me that I could do what I liked with the video,  I had myself become worried whether it was the best thing to distribute the video.     The NSF grant had prohibited me from paying the school kids who appeared in the video who were in some sense the main attraction of the video.     These kids  were benefiting from being in the video project,  learning the math,  being able to use the video camera which was new at the time,  and they all seemed to really enjoy working on the video once a week over the course of the school year.    Whilst they all had to have a consent form signed by their guardians to work on the video,  they were very much their unique American selves when they appeared on the video.   Even with the paid performers and the highly celebrated mathematicians,  the school kids were the stars of the video.  

Many of the kids in the video were children of the military or in the ROTC.     Because of waiting nervously for three years to hear whether the video was suitable to be released,   I had become worried about whether releasing the video would really serve the kids who were the stars of the video,  so I gave it to them instead. 

In particular my colleagues seemed to strongly dislike the way the video mixed up people who seemed to have very different ambitions and lifestyles.  

The selling points of the video were very simple.   There were some talented,  theatrical,  adorable kids who were explaining money calculations in the video.   Just about everyone who saw the video liked these children.    Many of these children could have decided to study mathematics at college if they could gain a scholarship.   However,   they were very different from the people who are in mathematics,  who are serious ambitious people who devote themselves very completely to the pursuit of math and are not  natural community players or exuberant comedians like the kids in the video.     I think perhaps these children had far more potential to be great math teachers than the vast majority of the people who go into math.   However, whether they would want to devote their lives to math to become math professors or industrial mathematicians is a question.    

The video explained to these children and the audience in no uncertain terms that there are jobs in mathematics and they pay good money.    However,  not many people go into mathematics and we are mostly geeks who don’t have much community appeal.    I think there was a question whether the kids would choose to devote as much of their day to math as was needed to get those jobs,  and indeed,  whether there are enough life paths in mathematics to have everyone pile in.    I think that my colleagues saw all of these talented intelligent kids who could do anything they wanted to do, and who can live in their own challenging community, whereas most mathematicians could not live in the community the kids live in, Most mathematicians depend on struggling devotedly to maintain their middle class life paths.  

Whilst the USA is a nation,  it is not a homogeneous one, and different cultures have established the life paths that exist and mostly they have struggled to secure their own life paths.   On the one hand the NSF was saying that it wanted the entire country to become mathematically more literate.   On the other hand,  if everyone in this country would become great at math in a generation,  which is perfectly feasible,   what would happen is that we would have taxi drivers who have math Ph.D.s   and there would be a big stop in the immigrant H1 visas.     I met some working class people who had math as their hobby in the past. It used to be a big hobby for enthusiasts in the UK and in India. It is unfortunately true that there have never been as many jobs created in mathematics as could be filled by the people who want them. Math could be applied more widely and more life paths in math could be created and more or less pay for themselves.

There is a big question whether academics want to have the working class become academics.   The working class is much more vibrant and diverse and depends on being together with each other.    The cultures are different.   Although many liberal politicians, educators and administrators were shouting loudly that they wanted to raise up the working class to be more highly educated,  the majority of the academy did not see it that way.  They wanted to raise up those few working class kids who could fit in with a very demanding system that has been established for centuries and in particular requires people to internalize certain values,  like often placing truth ahead of personal interests,   and placing merit ahead of community.     

In academia it is easier to be a strong lone individual than to be a lone individual with a big ambitious  community tagging along who all want academic jobs.      Academics are allowed to help students understand math to apply to their professions,  and raise up one or two people,  perhaps as many as ten for a very good supervisor,  perhaps as many forty for an exceptional mathematician. Sane math professors do not go to a working class community and raise expectations crying out good jobs! Good money!   That is irresponsible and sows discontent.   It is a very difficult and demanding job that requires an early,  successful and well supported start,   and complete  dedication. 

Most people in the academy would turn down most of their own community members from academic jobs for lack of merit on the competitive tests.   They consider themselves the elite,  and they are always afraid of giving up the academy to people who are primarily interested in having enough good paying jobs for  their own cultural group,   and do not want to either open up the field to competition or improve local education to supply the nations academies.   It is a big question whether competition is good or bad in this context. It is bad if it means that people cannot hope to attain good jobs in their own country. Whether you need to hire a candidate who has sufficient standards or the most knowledgeable candidate depends on the job itself. Many jobs involving math involve applying math that is already well understood, and might be done by anyone who has taken their standard undergraduate math courses whilst other jobs need more depth or originality. Academics generally see academic jobs and common degree level professions as quality jobs that already have communities of people who aim for those jobs. It used to be common for mathematics departments to set up recruitments for high schools and for undergraduates to show standardized professions like accountancy, statistical analysis in health, marketing, and economics, mathematical modeling in the sciences, and teacher training. These are quality jobs which have high standards of accuracy and integrity and companies select candidates who are dedicated to plain accurate work. The jobs are suitable for people who are able to be interested and fulfilled by a small range of objectives.    I did not understand that before I made the video, and I thought more that people are able to shape themselves to fit careers that are available. In actual fact, people want to have their own culture around them in their job and some cultures are already more suited to some types of work.   I started to understand this kind of cultural selection when I  saw people’s reactions.    When people discriminate and favor some cultural groups over others in mathematics,  that is generally because a cultural monopoly has been established and perpetuates itself. Mathematics used to be quite dismissive of people who showed inclinations to jack up all of the jobs to their friends who did not show much natural interest or devotion to the work. It was a situation the academic community was sensitive about and changing the demographic of job candidates significantly was met with very sturdy opposition. It started to be that departments were giving the most powerful people the personal right to hire.   One for your group,  one for his group,   one for his group.  You decide your candidate and you are supposed to pick the best or your group will not get high reviews and will lose relative status and power in the department unless you are super pushy. In the US, mathematicians tended not to be super pushy, and wanted to keep it that way. Even really impressive mathematicians would find the political climate in mathematics very egalitarian compared to most sciences.   It is more hierarchical in those subjects that depend on expensive labs and equipment to get started. That puts professors who have established a lab in power over all the young people and less successful older people who do not have their own equipment. It means that scientists who control labs get to review and approve all the research carried out in their lab, and get some credit for hosting it. The scientist who controls the lab shapes the direction of the major research projects and team work is a necessity. Math departments that were most successful generally required some amount of team work and most particularly in hiring. They succeeded in establishing a high standard when they had to extensively understand the work of candidates and explain it to each other rather than just reading out letters from other experts and never really looking at the details.  

It was unclear whether the school kids in the video were happy being associated with the performers in the video.  The school kids in the video were hoping to move into the middle class and secure jobs that paid a reasonable salary.   They were mostly dodging gangs and drugs in favor of getting educated and trying to get one of the scarce jobs in the community,  whereas the performers in the video were dancing professionally,  and were making a modest living out of their complete dedication to their art form.    These were completely different social groups and whilst they shared some of the same spaces,  were  different sections of the community with the school that was chosen for me to work in seeming to have kids who were better off and more economically stable with some exceptions.    I kind of felt that if the dancers were planning to do with math what they were doing with dance,  they were showing the dedication to succeed.  They were more vulnerable and super keen to get life paths.

At the end of the day,  there are only currently a certain number of life paths in academia and scientific research,  and they all fill up very enthusiastically with middle class people who have devoted themselves to their subjects which to most people seem very dry and unglamorous,  so you need to firstly be a person who is OK with that.   I personally began my 5 hours of daily math at age ten.   

Every mathematician knows that you need to keep engaged with the hours if you are going to be a world class mathematician because everyone else is putting in the hours. 

At the moment you have a lot of American administrators and department managers and lead mathematicians who manage a bunch of eager immigrants who are desperate to prove theorems and work for the boss.    In University of California,  the department used to be around 50% American born.   They  seemed to want to increase the percentage of foreigners which I personally do not understand.   Their idea seemed to be that Americans can be managers and foreigners can do more work and keep up the international standard.   Back in the day of Sputnik hiring, the American bosses were at the top of their fields.   They had come up through a world class educational system to be at the top of their fields.    The key is having that world class education at the lower levels.   It is not about competition either.    It is about putting more work into the lectures themselves,  and being willing to risk your competition learning the subject as well,  which seems to be the risk that undermines American education. 

   Once you get another culture of Americans into that mix,  it is not going to be the same.  I did not understand the dynamics of the profession when I started out with the video,  but the reactions I got started to make me realize that it was viewed as very naïve that a random community of great theatrical Americans could move from showbiz and military roles into math whilst fulfilling the actual serious needs of the profession.

The next thing that was a problem was that the kids dancing in the video were already professionals,  and not in research math.  Their agent had promised me that their performance would be appropriate for school kids.   Usually they were dancing at birthday parties, street parties, and big dance performances.    It was called Clown dancing,  and was similar but different to krumping and stripper dancing.  It was a big fad for 3-20 year olds in South LA  who were trying to get out of other gangs.    In the video,  their dancing was tied in with the narrative about struggle.    Their dancing was creative and improvisational,  but highly emotional and about  coarse aspects of life like anger, fighting,  reproduction, ego, competition,   individuality,  struggle,  oppression,  freedom,   effort,  duty,  intentionality,   and compulsion.     It is  not the usual  stylized  ballet or modern intellectualized dancing that the mathematical community has seen before.     Their dancing depicted struggle  which I felt really tied it in with learning and researching mathematics which is often a struggle of sorts with an abstract but very real  something called math which has a huge personality.  

Their dancing was also about abstract showmanship and competition.   Whilst most mathematicians keep their emotions to a minimum,  nevertheless at the top of mathematics there were also a lot of characters who like showing off and competing.   You only see that kind of behavior at the top of a profession.     You see the same kind of emotions from  teens at the top of the dance scene as you see from  40-50 year old mathematicians who are jockeying at the top of their field in terms of their technical mastery of the subject.    That aspect of the  personality can have a great stage in mathematics,  although most mathematicians prefer to keep their ego out of the subject,  and there is a strong movement against showing off.    There are a lot of people who believe that showing off is only meaningful if it represents years of deep struggle and is supported by a large crowd of people who appreciate and admire the theorems in question. 

In any case,   I don’t think that ordinary mathematicians who work with such reverential dedication to math wanted to advertise the subject as being loaded with opportunities for showmanship.    In mathematics in particular showmanship is limited to what the math allows you to do.   If it’s wrong it’s wrong.   From there one can only improve. 

The aspect of the video which I felt really demanded a larger audience were the interviews with professional minority mathematicians.     They talked in extremely candid terms about how their work was applied in the real world problems.   I really liked these interviews,  and wanted to put them on the web,  even though some of the areas were quite sensitive including a great variety of diverse applications such as counterterrorism for the government,   making money on stock trades,   calculating  chemotherapy levels in medical science,  and routing airplanes.    I very much liked knowing that earnest,  honest and responsible people were doing that work.

I was many times discouraged by people’s reactions to the video.    I went up to LA and showed the video to a guy who was in the video and had been the top math student in the class of students I had been working with to make the video.   He had wanted to either become a football player as first choice, or a mathematician as second choice.   He  watched the video and I wanted to know whether he wanted to get some kind of scholarship to work on math at UCSD over the summer.   He did not.  Neither had his math talent apparently continued to flourish in high school.    He had nothing particular to say about the video but he was not very interested or keen on it.    He seemed to be dealing with a lot of forces that were negative to his developing his mathematical talent.   He needed to help his family,  and if possible get a job close to home.    An expenses grant was not going to entice him to travel a hundred miles down the road to work on some math and extend the video.    People had complained that the video was missing the college student age group.  I had not planned that to happen.    I wanted to get the professional mathematicians to tell their stories. 

Not one of the African Americans who watched the video or got a copy of the video ever said that they actually liked it.  The people who liked it were all women educators who saw bits of it or all of it and thought the children were adorable.    Comments ranged from non-mathematicians who said it should be sped up and not slowed down for the math and that my speed choices were awkward and went against the conventional and natural flow of video material. Some of  my colleagues felt it was mixing up people who were serious middle class people who had struggled to succeed in academics  with people who were  vulnerable,  and kids who were going to go into all kinds of jobs in the community, very few and probably none had the determination or individuality to become research mathematicians.    I only wish that enough  jobs for them had been there so that they could decide for themselves whether they wanted to study math when they had saved up enough to make it happen.  There seemed to be thousands if not millions of school kids who are never told at age ten what it takes to be a research mathematician and therefore they never get the idea to get started on it. One of my colleagues told me that instead of trying to get an overview of the situation and making a video I should have started a Gelfand seminar for middle school students to get them on the early track to serious academics. It was easy to agree in hindsight. I felt my work was a start, and just hoped that by giving out some videos to participants it would amount to something. I had given a lot of time to understanding all kinds of aspects of the problem from watching some incredibly talented middle school math teachers, to learning the details from some kids of exactly what was standing in the way of their academic success which was the need to stay close to home and help their families, the instabilities that got in their way regarding security and economic stability, and just an overall lack of attention to having them be able to achieve the quality life paths that were funneled to the middle class. Student loans are way risky. College in general meant too large a step away from the neighborhood. There was too much competition for all types of assets in a community that had been very neglected and where holding on to territory was such a burden of responsibility. Most people wanted to leave the neighborhood, and get a job with enough money to move up to somewhere with less pressure. At the lower economic bracket communities are shoulder to shoulder and space is very hard to find. More MAGA starts with giving people who are feeling that squeeze more stability, and having people with political power think about how to give good life paths that can harness that American talent and positivity into healthy stability. However, I had more than more than used up my allocation of time on the issue, and was under enormous pressure to write some academic papers and teach more undergraduate classes.

Q.   So you ended up just giving the video to the community that helped you make it,  because you felt that people did not understand  its message and were making associations connecting the people in the video in ways that were not intended ? 

 Kate.   That’s right.   The response I got indicated that it was not sufficiently conventional.    It was a first attempt and like most things, practice makes perfect.   I hope it was useful.   It was created just a year or so before the stock market crash and the rise of Obama.  The videos I would make now are very different and I would not try to embellish a story with imagery which might just confuse the math.

I got the grant to make the video in 1997.   It was a National Science Foundation PECASE award.   In my grant proposal I said I would make videos to get working class kids interested in math. 

 It was something that the NSF was interested in at the time,  getting women, minorities and working class people into higher mathematics.   That was a time when factories were leaving the US and the educated liberals had the idea that the US was going to become a country of educated elite.    They wanted to pull up the entire American working class into the upper middle class and have all the working class jobs offshore.  

They liked my proposal which was mostly a math research proposal with a small section to interest working class kids in math by making videos.   However,  my colleagues were very negative to start with.   One guy up at MIT told me when I got the grant that he was very sad because it would just be one more failed attempt to get American working class kids into math.    I had two professors at UCSD come to my office and tell me to forget the video part of my proposal.   They said that I  was crazy to get involved with elementary math and getting school kids into math who were just learning arithmetic.   I was not at that level of mathematics or that salary level and it would be a complete waste of my time.    They said there were people who could make math videos for school kids better and more cheaply,  whereas I could do research math,  so I should not waste my time.  It would end up messing up my great career prospects not to be focusing entirely on my work.   

 I was worried about what they said,  but  I had always figured I should do something for the civil rights movement once I had tenure,  even if only for a couple of years of my time.   I was extremely naïve and did not have a clue about politics in the US or multiculturalism. 

 I had been told by a professor in the UK to come to the US because they liked black women professionals in academics here and I would have more opportunities.     They told me I could stay at Cambridge to do a Ph.D. and they would fund me,    but one or two of them really wanted to send me over here.   They thought I would do better here because of how much the US wanted black women to join the academy.   

That turned out to be partially true.   When I arrived there was already a big African American academy which was coming up and there were people bridging the gap between the African American schools and the schools which had traditionally not had large numbers of African Americans enrolling.   There were people like Bill Massey and Scott Williams who were active in trying to overcome a divide which had built up.   Only  a few schools were diversified.   Howard was the most famous HBCU  which had a diversity of professors with mostly African American and African men in the math department.   I gave a couple of talks there and one time stayed with one of the professors there and his family, and I am still alive. 

There was a lot of affirmative action in all the top schools here in the US when I arrived.   However,   mostly it was about accepting more women students,  skimming off the top SAT scoring African American students,   and hiring more women faculty.    I was often getting solicited for positions or nominations or being on committees that involved affirmative action money,  and when it got into a conversation I was told many times over that affirmative action was all about hiring women.  Women were not well represented in the top schools at all, although much better represented lower down the ratings.   I asked about affirmative action for minorities,  but was told that it was not happening.

 I never tried to represent myself as an African American although some folks visiting my department once tried to count me as an African American  and when I apologized that I was not an American citizen they were puzzled and asked each other what to do about one that did not self identify. 

Anyway, to get back to the question,  I did not understand the cultural or racial divisions here at all.   To my face I was treated very well in the US.  I was always being evaluated as a woman mathematician,  and was part of a generation of talented American women coming out of grad school that included good people like Karen Smith,  Christiana Sormani,   Thalia Jeffres,  Emily Hamilton and Lynn Butler.

When I started to make the video I had asked my mother-in-law from Sweden how to explain negative numbers to children.   She said that the easiest way to explain it was with money.  Her father had been the local banker in their farming region and so it was natural for her to think about that.   My mother-in-law had a job teaching immigrants who had just arrived in Sweden to speak Swedish and understand the culture.   She talked with so much admiration and enthusiasm about her students who were mostly refugees and came from troubled areas of the world.    They were very grateful to her for sharing Swedish culture with them and some of them would invite her home and she would marvel and talk about how wonderful they were.  She had several students from Muslim countries and was trying to make proper Swedes out of them.   

So it was my mother-in-law who gave me the idea to start off filming kids teaching money sums,  and my husband was an expert in electrical engineering and particularly liked high tech electronics.   He used to make speakers when he was a teen.    He set me up with all of the camera and recording equipment I needed so that I could go and set up anywhere to film or record for the video.   However, I hired  a professional cameraman from one of the LA TV stations to do some of the more difficult work.  He was the friend of the brother of a friend of mine from Cuban dance class and she also did some work on the video as well.  I contracted the animation  from a UCSD graduate student in the film department.    All of these people had a copy of the video at some time,  but I don’t think anyone put it on the web.   I just don’t think people liked it that much or liked it being made by someone who was not an American.     It was a conglomeration of pure Americana that was put together by a struggling research mathematician from the UK who was doing that instead of teaching her expertise.    As artwork goes I gave mine a grade A, but I did not create most of the engaging content that represented other people's work and personalities. It is a stylized documentary about other real people's real lives.

This is what we do.   That is what you do.   You don’t do what we do.   If we didn’t do it already then it is because it was not a great idea.  

Basically I did not put the video on the web because nobody from the community where I made it expressed any interest in having it distributed,  and I was intimidated by their lack of enthusiasm.    I felt the best thing was to give it to them and see what they wanted to do with it.     I kept a copy for myself and if I find it I might put it up because twenty years on I feel that it would be good to show what the tax payers money was spent on.   I have had a problem with someone taking things from me and I don’t know why or what they want from me.