Finding community in mathematics
Corrine Yap’s mathematics classrooms are shaped by the mentors, collaboration and support she found on her own educational journey.
For Corrine Yap, mathematics is a fundamentally collaborative enterprise. She believes that admitting confusion, asking someone to explain an idea again and challenging a colleague’s reasoning are essential. That partnership, Yap says, allows mathematicians to develop a common language as they work toward solving a problem together.
“If my math career ended up being me just sitting at my desk working on problems by myself, then I would not enjoy that at all,” she says. “Working with other people and collaborating with other people is what I enjoy the most about math.”
As a new member of Mount Holyoke’s mathematics faculty, Yap brings this philosophy to her research in combinatorics, probability and statistical physics. She studies how random processes evolve and how we can use them to model complex systems. One example she gives is a random graph in which points stand for social-media users and the lines connecting them represent friendships. When a network is too large to examine one connection at a time, mathematicians can generate random models and study which structural patterns are likely to emerge.
Yap’s own academic path was shaped by mentors. At Sarah Lawrence College, sarah-marie belcastro introduced her to discrete mathematics and combinatorics. Later, while pursuing her doctorate at Rutgers University during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yap attended an online course taught by Will Perkins on the intersections of combinatorics and statistical physics. The course led to a research collaboration and, eventually, a postdoctoral position at Georgia Tech.
That experience also highlighted Yap’s tendency to pick research problems by choosing the colleagues with whom she wants to collaborate. One current project grew from conversations with friends about applying probability and statistical physics to mathematical origami and crease patterns.
Yap brings the same spirit to the classroom. Her inquiry-based teaching style, she says, minimizes time spent lecturing and encourages students to engage in mathematics together. “I think students will understand and retain mathematics better if they connect the dots themselves,” she says. This fall, Yap is teaching two sections of MATH-232: Discrete Mathematics. She was drawn to Mount Holyoke because its small, interdisciplinary community reminded her of Sarah Lawrence, and the College’s strong mathematics department offered the support she wanted for both teaching and research.
“I'm excited to be in a small classroom and have students who are not just students interested in math but also students who are bringing in perspectives from art and music and theater and anthropology and history,” Yap says.
Beyond her research and teaching, Yap’s interests extend to theater. Her one-woman play, “Uniform Convergence,” intertwines mathematics with questions of race, gender and academic culture. Having developed the play as an undergraduate when she was concentrating in theater, she has since performed the piece at conferences and mathematics departments around the country. Yap is also an avid reader and enjoys playing board games (“a common thing in mathematics,” she laughs).
