What are Dr. Super Math Circles?

Our Math Circles began as a very small family experiment when the children were young—Cyrus and Marc were around eight years old when we started, and later Rooz, Adam, and eventually Ava joined in, with Ava beginning mathematical activities at about four. From the beginning, the purpose was not to reproduce the school curriculum or to push the children through a sequence of formulas. Instead, I wanted them to experience mathematics as something they could **see, explore, play with, question, and discover for themselves**. We therefore began with puzzles, patterns, games, diagrams, geometric constructions, physical models, and other forms of **visual mathematics** that allowed fairly young children to encounter ideas that would ordinarily be considered far beyond their grade level. Over the years, the Math Circles have ranged widely through **Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Linear Algebra, Imaginary and Complex Numbers, Abstract Algebra, Probability, Calculus, and Mechanics**, along with many other mathematical and scientific topics. The emphasis has always been less on how old a student is supposed to be before seeing an idea and more on whether we can find a visual, intuitive, or experimental way for the student to begin understanding it. An increasingly important part of the Math Circles has been the use of outstanding mathematical videos, particularly **Grant Sanderson’s 3Blue1Brown series**, whose visual approach to mathematics fits naturally with our philosophy. Rather than simply watching the videos, however, we try to turn them into starting points for exploration: we pause, ask questions, draw pictures, work examples, build activities, and give the students an opportunity to discover for themselves the mathematics that the videos so beautifully illustrate. More recently, this process has developed into something much larger. The notes, worksheets, diagrams, experiments, and—most importantly—the **actual work completed by the students during the Math Circles** have become the raw material for developing more organized learning activities. In collaboration with AI, we have begun transforming this accumulated material into **Teacher’s Guides, student activities, solutions, interactive web activities, and online explorations** that other students, parents, and teachers can use. Our first extensive effort in this direction is **Adventures in Calculus & Mechanics**, where the original Math Circle approach has grown into a sequence combining guided discovery, visual mathematics, experiments, videos, worksheets, and interactive online activities. We hope to do the same for some of the other subjects that the children have explored over the years. In this way, what began as a few children sitting around a table doing mathematics for the pleasure of discovering something new is gradually becoming an archive—and, we hope, a useful collection of resources showing that **young students can explore surprisingly advanced mathematics when the ideas are presented visually, intuitively, and with an invitation to discover rather than simply memorize**.