“Why are we learning this?” — the dreaded question often received by math professors.

In this colloquium, the speaker will share his story of using his math-professor background to devise new solutions to two practical problems that affect our whole society: disease control and education. His original research specialty was combinatorics, and both graph theory and game theory feature as inspirations in his work. During the COVID lockdown, he invented an app (https://novid.org) which solves the incentive misalignment problem intrinsic in contact tracing: in the traditional approach, people are asked to isolate to protect others against infection, not to save themselves. He has also been working for a decade at the intersection of education and technology. His latest creation there is a new, massively-scalable ecosystem for teaching middle school students creative math problem solving, powered by a unique incentive alignment structure that involves professionally trained actors and comedians (https://live.poshenloh.com). He will also share about his journey which led to this discovery, which involved giving hundreds of talks in public parks all around the country (https://www.wsj.com/articles/chatgpt-ai-math-po-shen-loh-1e9f80dc?st=WNc8zK&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink).