Mathematics Changes Lives

I try very hard these days to search for stories that lift my spirits, some days my quest isn’t an easy one. The news feed on my cell phone seems to have little to report other than the madness of the “great pumpkin” to the south of us. I can always count on CBC Radio to feed my soul and it didn’t let me down the other day while driving to get my flu shot.
Matt Galloway and The Current introduced me to Christopher Havens and Walker Blackwell. Havens is serving a life sentence for a drug-related murder in Monroe Correctional Centre in Washington. Right off the bat, that doesn’t sound much like a positive story. But wait, there’s always more to the story than meets the eye. I have played the podcast several times and what struck me was the sound of this man’s voice. He made no excuses for his actions that landed him in prison nor did he direct blame at anyone or anything but himself. What he wanted to talk about what his love of mathematics and how it changed his life.
Christopher was a mediocre student in school, certainly not a mathematics genius. While existing in solitary confinement for one year for bad prison behaviour, he was given an envelope by an elderly man, Mr. G, and the envelope contained a collection of mathematics puzzles. While Christopher slept on a concrete bed in a tiny space with lights on 24 hours a day, which the prison refers to as “restrictive housing”, he immersed himself in the puzzles and it ignited something in him he had never felt before – passion to learn, and in this case, passion to learn about mathematics.
After Christopher exhausted the mathematics resources in the prison, he wrote to a mathematics journal, Mathematical Sciences Publishers, for help with finding materials to feed his love of mathematics and a request for someone to communicate with about mathematics. The production editor at that time was Matthew Cargo, whose partner was Marta Cerruti, a professor at McGill University, Montreal, whose parents were Luisella Caire, professor analysis at Polytechnic University in Turin, Italy and Umberto Cerruti, Professor of Computational Algebra at the University of Torino, Italy. This convoluted and unlikely connection led Christopher to co-write a paper published in 2020 on his work with continued fractions.
Mathematics changed Christopher’s outlook on life and fueled his ambition for self-betterment. “Getting a degree in prison significantly decreases recidivism,” Christopher explained and yet “post-secondary opportunities are limited”. Access to books and learning materials is quite a challenge. Caire and Cerruti sent Christopher a box of mathematics books but the prison didn’t allow him access to the books so, Christopher had an idea – a Prison Mathematics Project where men like him could meet to study math as a means to improve themselves. This started to help other inmates and allowed the box of books to be used. Enter – Walker Blackwell, a teenager from Plano, Texas, who also has a profound love of mathematics. When Walker heard about the Mathematics Project at the Monroe prison, he wanted to help Christopher gain access to mathematics books and to expand Christopher’s idea to reach prisoners on a national level. They are a team working toward this end.
We know that many individuals find themselves in prison because of poverty, addiction, little or no family support. If they could be part of a system that wants them to be released as active and productive members of society, then education and opportunities for betterment is essential. We imprison lawbreakers to punish, but our focus should be to help them change how they view the world and how they react to it. Violence is often an expression of fear, of not belonging, of being marginalized. Why not try to change that while these individuals are behind bars.
Christopher Havens isn’t an anomaly, nor is the generous spirit of Walker Blackwell. There are many like them. They are examples of how we can do things better, how we can think outside the box and create opportunity for change, from which we as a society all benefit.
wendistewart@live.ca