In his first full-time teaching job, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Dave Gaebler seeks to combine math’s practicality with its beauty. His liberal arts perspective made him a good fit for the Hillsdale faculty this year.
Gaebler tries to show his students how ideas were formed so they understand how things work on a deeper level.
“Ideally I think in math the student should feel like with a little bit of hard work or time that they could have come up with all this,” he said. “It is sort of in the nature of math that in principle anybody could have thought of it. You have to be smart or clever but there is no sort of outside knowledge or specialized data you need access to.”
Gaebler received a Ph.D in Mathematics from the University of Iowa, a Masters in Mathematics from UCLA and a Masters in Biblical Studies from Westminster Seminary California.
“One way or another, I’ve been in school for a long time,” he said.
The math department’s view on math stood out to Gaebler.
“They think math is beautiful, that it is sort of intrinsically worthy of study which fits in with the liberal arts atmosphere so in that way it does seem consistent with the overall philosophy of the college as a liberal arts college,” Gaebler said. “In a lot of places math is either a tool that you have to put up with so that you can do other stuff or something you run away from in pain and horror.”
