This year, the Fieldston Math Department welcomed a new teacher: Uyen Nguyen. Nguyen teaches Geometry and Topics in Precalculus, spanning forms III-VI.
Nguyen was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. Growing up, the majority of their classmates had blonde hair and blue eyes and were of the same religion. “It was a little ostracizing to be in an environment where I was the odd one out,” said Nguyen. They came to New York City for college and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from The Cooper Union. While earning their degree, Nguyen also dove into their main passion: origami. “I spent a lot of my days in college ignoring the courses I was supposed to be taking and just learning different math properties about different shapes to be able to design my own origami,” they said.
After college, Nguyen went to Cornell to do physics research under a grant to study origami mechanics: “Origami mechanics comes into play whenever you are dealing with the transformation of material between 2 and 3 dimensions, whenever you want reversible deformations, or whenever you want things to be compact and then later expand. An example would be in the design of airbags. You want them to be very compactly folded (2D) before they are deployed, but then more voluminous (3D) when the need arises”. After that, they began curating origami exhibitions; their exhibition at the Chimei Museum in Taiwan had almost 400 works of art from all around the world.
Nguyen was drawn to Fieldston because of the community. “I wanted to be in an environment where I felt safe and felt like my identity would be respected since I am trans– I am nonbinary— where that wouldn’t be ridiculed or invalidated or put into question all of the time. It felt like Fieldston would be a place where I’d be able to find that. It’s a place where I can find community and camaraderie in my colleagues and that’s been pretty rewarding,” they said. Nguyen loves teaching geometry in particular because it “goes hand in hand with origami. My two obsessions in life are shapes and colors. Geometry is the study of shapes,” said Nguyen.
As for their goals at Fieldston, Nguyen hopes to “bring [their] love of math and mathematical art to the community so people can see how to use math very creatively.” They want to achieve this by starting an origami club in the future.
Lastly, Nguyen is an example of queer and Asian representation at Fieldston. “I hope I can encourage students to not be afraid of being themselves because I was in hiding and closeted for a lot of my life and I’m a lot happier when I’m not doing that… I will wear the crazy things I wear because they bring me joy. And they’re just for me. If they happen to bring other people joy too—that’s a plus,” they said.
