Any visitor to the office of mathematics Professor Steven Zucker is immediately drawn in. On the shelves, cartoons mix and mingle with stacks of books, and an old picture of Zucker himself sits tucked neatly behind a newspaper. And of course, the chalkboard nearly is filled with complex math expressions.
Zucker is a carefree professor, known among his students for his outrageous comments and delightfully off-color jokes.
"Everyone knows that I am from Mars," Zucker said, when asked where he was born and raised. However, our sources tell us that it is much more likely that Zucker was born and raised in Queens, NY.
Quickly recognized as a gifted student at Martin Van Buren High School, Zucker was ushered into advanced math and science classes, areas that were of dire importance in the post-Sputnik era.
Zucker found he was interested in mathematics and physics especially, and these subjects quickly rose to the top of the list of what he planned to study in college.
After being admitted to Brown University for his undergraduate studies, Zucker found himself in an Honors Calculus III course his freshman year. This course, although unconventional, was perfect for Zucker, who is an unconventional man himself.
"I ate it all up," Zucker recalled, in reference to the course that was possibly the most influential in Zucker's path to becoming a mathematician.
After completing his undergraduate studies at Brown, Zucker attended graduate studies at Princeton which he completed in 1974. After his studies, Zucker was a visiting professor at Rutgers and Indiana University before he accepted a position in the mathematics department at Hopkins.
Zucker is well-known in the mathematical community for his work with algebraic geometry in the theories of L2 cohomology. One result, proven by Zucker in 1978, was named appropriately the Zucker Conjecture, an idea profound enough to deserve its own Wikipedia entry.
"Math is a universal language, along with English," Zucker joked, when asked what keeps his passion for mathematics research burning.
Already an accomplished mathematician, Zucker began to dabble in the field of teaching, an area that truly sparked his interest after coming to Hopkins.
Zucker's passion for mathematics education is deep; when asked about his accomplishments, he did not cite his well-known contributions to mathematical research, but instead, noted his award for Excellence in Teaching that he received in 2004.
"I noticed that Hopkins students often had trouble adjusting [academically] to the University," Zucker said.
Originally suspecting his own ineptitude in capturing students' interest, Zucker said he went beyond the demands of his job and increased the amount of time he spent planning effective, interesting lectures. Despite this effort, Zucker still noticed that students were struggling with the transition from high school mathematics to the rigor required in college.
To explain this observation, Zucker came up with two likely possibilities: covered grades and the shift in how mathematics is taught between high school and college. Zucker contends that while high school students are spoon-fed how to do math, college students must learn to learn on their own.
With this as a launching point, Zucker began writing commentaries and lectures on the education of mathematics. What had begun as a personal search soon evolved into a passion for teaching.?
However, there is more to Zucker's eccentric personality than his work as a professor. From playing tournament bridge in college to traveling the world, from working out three days a week at the recreation center to playing and listening to classical piano, from photography to watching movies, this professor has a wide range of interests outside of teaching and research.
One of Zucker's favorite quotes by Francois de La Rochefoucauld gives a rare glimpse into the inner workings of this professor: "The world rewards the appearance of merit oftener than merit itself," to which Zucker responds, "It is a cause of great frustration that people want simple criteria for making judgments on complicated things."
