If anyone wants to learn how to knit a Möbius strip, new Upper School math teacher Dan O’Loughlin would be the person to go to.
O’Loughlin comes from St. Catherine University, where he was Department Chair for Math and Physics. He is replacing Upper School math teacher George Leiter for the 2012-2013 school year. “I found out there was going to be a one-year leave position at SPA and so I checked it out in the fall and it worked out,” O’Loughlin said. “I was very impressed with SPA when I came and visited, and still impressed.”
He decided to be a math teacher because “a lot of my role models when I was young were teachers, so I’ve had some really good math teachers in middle school and junior high.”
O’Loughlin has taught both college and high school students before coming to St. Paul Academy and Summit School. “The rhythm of the day is much different in college,” he said. “We only have three classes a week and there’s much more that happens outside of class.”
His favorite math problem is the Poincaré conjecture, a famous Millennium Prize Problem. The Poincaré conjecture states, “Every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.” It was solved by a Russian mathematician who refused to accept the million dollar prize.
Aside from knitting non-orientable math surfaces, O’Loughlin also enjoys bicycling, cooking, and participating in triathlons. When asked where in the world he’d go if he had the chance, he responded, “I don’t know if this will ever happen but I would like to go to Antarctica just to go see what it’s like.”