A math professor at William Paterson University is trying to make algebra less intimidating with his latest book, which uses games and brainteasers to help students grasp complex mathematical concepts.
Dr. David Nacin, a math professor in the Department of Mathematics Sciences, wrote “The Group Theory Puzzle Book,” an interactive resource designed to make math more manageable for students of all levels.
Group theory, a common math course in universities, is a branch of algebra concerned with how numbers are organized. Because of its abstract nature, group theory concepts can be hard to learn, making them difficult for students to visualize and grasp.
It is “an upper-level class and a lot of students don’t take it, because they are scared of it,” Nacintold The Beacon said in an interview.
At William Paterson, Nacin said students also find group theory hard.
“So one of the big purposes of my book is to make Group Theory friendlier, to make it less intimidating,” Nacin said. To make group theory easier to grasp — and to motivate students to want to learn it — Nacin’s book combines group theory and puzzle-solving, covering various underlying group theory principles, such as cyclic, dihedral, and permutation groups. The puzzles in the book help illustrate their structures.
Photo courtesy of William Paterson University
“My goal is to make it fun for them. So basically I make a game for them and it’s similar to the kind of puzzles you see in the newspapers,” Nacin said. He added that the idea was to create a puzzle book reminiscent of games like Sudoku, in which players have to use reasoning to determine where the numbers one through nine go in a 9×9 grid with no repeating numbers in any row or column.
“In the book, we start with newspaper-like puzzles, and then we tweak the puzzles just a little bit. Suddenly, you are doing group theory,” he explained. “So we are changing the number system
they are dealing with to allow the students to get some experience with these groups just from doing puzzles.”
Nacin said such puzzles and games might help reduce students’ fear of math in elementary, middle, and high school.
“I was reading about some studies where they ask people to rank their fears and the fear of math is more than the fear of dying,” he told The Beacon. “So it is a phobia, and you see people close down, and their brains close down because they are not using the thinking part of their brain.
“The Group Theory Puzzle Book” isn’t Nacin’s first attempt at gamifying math. In 2019, Nacin also published “Math-Infused Sudoku.”
“What that book does is introduces new rules to Sudoku with clues and examples at the beginning,” he said.
“Let’s give the numbers some meanings,” he added.
