Denis Auroux is so popular as a teacher, his students have honored him on Facebook and YouTube.
Mason Inman
Only a handful of professors have fan clubs on Facebook, the social networking website popular among university students. MIT mathematician Denis Auroux has two (click here and here), which together have more than 200 student members. He is even the star of YouTube videos made by students during his classes and posted online last semester.
One of the videos captures an Auroux hallmark: his speedy blackboard erasing. He teaches introductory multivariable calculus—a required course for all MIT undergraduates—in a large lecture hall with blackboards that overlap each other and move up and down by mechanical controls. Auroux often furiously erases all of the writing on one board before it’s covered by a blank one coming down.
“He’s gotten applause for a few of his more impressive erasings,” says Andrea Greb, a co-founder of one of Auroux’s fan clubs.
His students also praise his teaching skills. “Professor Auroux was an excellent professor in that he avoided overcomplicating things, which a lot of MIT professors tend to do,” Greb says. “His lectures were well organized, easy to follow, and he taught us the material we needed to know without any useless digressions into his research or irrelevant examples or lengthy explanations of theory we’d never need to know.”
MIT math professor Denis Auroux has two student fan clubs devoted to him. (Credit: Donna Coveney, MIT)
Teaching excellence can come down to basic things, like handwriting. On an MIT website where students review classes, former student Thomas Goldring wrote, “Auroux was clear and concise and his handwriting was the neatest of any teacher I’ve ever met, which was useful in the largest lecture hall at MIT.”
Taught to teach
Auroux is modest about his students’ affection for him. He says that perhaps his youth—he earned tenure last year at age 29—has helped students warm up to him. “I’m somewhat younger than a lot of my colleagues, and maybe I come across as not quite as scary,” he says with a laugh.
Auroux credits his success at teaching to training he got while in his native country of France. As an undergraduate, Auroux took classes to qualify as a high school teacher, in case he didn’t make it into graduate school. “It certainly made me aware of a lot of things, such as trying to explain things clearly, trying to give a reasonable presentation on the blackboard,” he says.
He puts special effort into teaching because he wants to have an impact beyond his research, which is in an abstract area of mathematics called symplectic geometry. “Pure math can be tremendously useful, but to society at large, it takes a while for it to filter through to applications to physics and then to engineering,” he says. “By teaching, I can be more immediately useful. So I feel that’s something I have to do seriously.”
On the subject of his neat handwriting, Auroux attributes that to the chalk. “There is this fat chalk that seems to only exist in the U.S.—everything seems to be supersized here—and that actually forces you to write neatly.”
Click here for another YouTube video of Auroux in class.