Math Professor Don Davis Retired After 50 Years With Tributes and a Recent National Championship
When math professor Don Davis retired after the spring 2024 semester, he received many accolades, but he also got an unexpected retirement gift.
The tributes were not surprising for a highly regarded and dedicated teacher of undergraduates for 50 years, who saw his students go on to the best graduate schools in the world, and mentor of 13 Ph.D. students, most of whom he is still in touch with.
But what he didn’t count on was that coinciding with his retirement, one of five Lehigh Valley American Regional Mathematics League (ARML) teams he coaches would win the national championship, the first time since 2011, beating nemesis San Fransisco Bay Area on June 1, 2024.
The win was unexpected, but not surprising, given the mentoring, patience and expertise Davis has offered since 1993 to hundreds of high schoolers who learned from Davis how teamwork could improve their competitive edge.
For 30 years, Davis, now 79, has gathered groups of 15 students on teams referred to as Fire (“the A team”), Ice, Lightning, and Thunder (and previously Storm), to attend practices on the Lehigh campus -- some coming from an hour away -- and learn from Davis the benefits of patience, practice and collaboration.
During those years Fire, won four national championships, one in 2005, 2009, 2010 and 2011. The team came in second in second in 2007, 2012, 2022, and 2023, and third in 2006, 2018 and 2021. The national competition, in which more than 1,600 students compete in 113 teams, is held simultaneously at Penn State, University of Alabama at Huntsville, University of Iowa, and University of Nevada at Reno. Competitors for the Lehigh Valley team went to Penn State to compete.
“We had finished second in the last two years to San Fransisco Bay Area,” Davis said. “We didn’t expect to beat them, and it was very exciting. We knew before the awards ceremony we had won, because we watched real time scoring. That was part of the excitement.”
The competition is in four parts: the team round, where students are asked 10 questions in 20 minutes (Lehigh got eight right, and San Fransisco got five right) which helped the win; an individual round; relays; and a power round in which 15 students work together for an hour.
Davis’s key to success? “We practice a lot,” he said. He plans to continue to coach the teams, on which the students are often happy to realize there are other high school students who like math as much as they do.
Davis, who holds degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, also has spent many hours teaching in the classroom. He has contributed to 150 mathematical papers on algebraic topology, including one in the prestigious Annals of Mathematics. He plans to continue to write papers and continue as executive editor of the journal Homology, Homotopy and Applications.
At a banquet held for his retirement, Karen McCready, who earned her Ph.D. at Lehigh in 2012 and is now a professor at Kings College, reminded Davis that he graded assignments so quickly that it seemed like “he would take it with one hand and hand it back to you with the other hand already graded.”
He “always gave very well-prepared lectures and thoughtful assignments, on which he provided careful and encouraging feedback. . . .” she said.
McCready thanked Davis for his mentorship: “At this time 12 years ago yesterday, I was walking around beaming with a huge smile on my face that lasted the whole day. I still remember it well because it was the day that I defended my dissertation here at Lehigh, something I could not have accomplished without the excellent guidance of Don Davis. I know I’m not the only one who feels that way, as I am one of 13 people who had the honor of having Don as a Ph.D. advisor, and I want to thank him on behalf of all of us for all that he’s done for us.”
Another tribute was from Xiaoxue Li, who received her Ph.D. in 2007: “The highly abstract and intriguing concepts of topology, along with Professor Davis’s remarkable teaching, made this class one of my favorites.”
Kataryna Potocka Kowal, a Ph.D. student from 2004, who now is director of the New Jersey Undergraduate Math Competition, noted that she was proud she can pass on what he taught her to her own students. “I'm grateful for the countless opportunities you've provided for my professional development, for arranging for talks that I gave at various universities and conferences as a Ph.D. student, including a conference in Japan. You've greatly contributed to where I am today and who I am today. You are my role model."
One retirement gift was an eye-catching quilt from a parent whose daughter had been on an ARML team for six years. It was made of her team T-shirts. Parent involvement has been important, and several past and present parents spoke at the banquet.
In addition to the many dedicated parents, Lehigh graduate Paul Martino ’95, supports the team with his enthusiasm. Funding from the Aarati P. and Paul J. Martino ’95 Fund allows the ARML students to participate without fees. Martino, who was interested in fractals, met Davis as an eighth grader, when Davis was curating a fractal art show.
“Don became a mentor to me almost immediately. We would stop in to see him once or twice a year and we would discuss my science fair projects for example,” said Martino.
In addition to his teaching, knowledge of his subject and work with ARML, Davis’s mentoring sets him apart. Says McCready, he “helped me when I was weighing various factors as I was getting ready to graduate and making job decisions. I remember him telling me something to the effect that when considering where to go, as long as you can be happy with your work and the people you work with.”
Being happy with his work and the people he works with is something Davis knows a lot about.