Vita of Dr. Irvin M. Miller


If not for the intervention and help of my mother I would have failed the first grade.  Because my father is an engineer who informally coached me, I was the only one to score 100 on a fourth grade math word problem quiz, despite missing the first two weeks of school.  Ultimately I was considered a top student through the twelfth grade, going to an accelerated science and engineering high school.  It was my parents who taught me that you learn geometry though understanding and not through rote.

In college the head of the math department asked me to consider switching my major from electrical engineering to math.  I graduated in three years as the top electrical engineer in my class.  In graduate school I taught myself how to program computers.  My graduate degree is in experimental high energy physics.

In my professional career I lived my dream of being a problem solver at IBM, including getting a math-related patent.  I made extensive use of mathematics and my hobby of photography as I worked with computer graphics, and published a landmark article in the
Harvard Business Review.  During summer jobs at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory I made contributions in the field of magnetohydrodynamics--plasma containment.

Despite my extensive education and experience, I discovered that everything I had been taught in mathematics was either incomplete or incorrect.  I have now re-taught myself elementary mathematics.

I am teaching math to all grade levels in an elementary school and have taught teachers how to teach math more effectively.  I have also taught parents how to teach math to their own and other children, and have written more than a dozen books on mathematics.

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