Arek Goetz, Ph.D.

Professor Goetz’s research involves piecewise isometric functions. He was so young when his interest in mathematics first emerged that he had to call his mother, a mathematics teacher, to help him remember how it all began. It was in his hometown of Wroclaw, Poland, and he was not quite 3 years old. His mother bought him some educational toys to help him learn how to add numbers whose sums were greater than 10. A year later, when he was asked why he stood alone in nursery school while the other children played, he reported that it was because he was busy doing multiplication tables for numbers less than 100 in his head. Today, Goetz is one of only about 40 people in the world researching piecewise isometric functions.