RAPID CITY, SD (May 21, 2019) — Travis Kowalski starts
most days with a squiggle.
For the past eight years, the South Dakota Mines math professor and department head has carried on a family tradition
started by his father, who would ask the young Travis to make a squiggle on a
piece of paper. From that squiggle, his father would create a drawing. Often, Kowalski’s
father would give him a squiggle and the two would sit together drawing.
Nowadays, Kowalski uses a napkin and markers in his
“squiggle game,” and the recipients are his two daughters – Liliana, 13, and
Maia, 9. Kowalski says he started the tradition when Liliana was entering
kindergarten, hoping the lunch napkin art would make her transition to school
easier.
Each evening or early in the morning, Kowalski
encouraged his oldest to draw a squiggle on a napkin. The next morning, he turned
the squiggle into colorful drawings and slipped it into her lunch box. Once
Maia arrived, Kowalski began doing the same for her. “She expected it,” he
says.
It’s not exactly what most people expect from a math
professor at an engineering and science university. But Kowalski, a Ph.D. who
currently serves as the interim head of the Department of Mathematics at SD
Mines, says math and art co-mingle perfectly.
His drawings range from a buffalo against a bright
pink sky (drawn May 6, 2019) to an astronaut in space (Jan. 24, 2019), to
Kermit the Frog (Dec. 7, 2018), to the composer Bach at his harpsichord (May
14, 2018). Kowalski posts both the starting squiggle and the finished product
on his Facebook and Instagram pages - @travis.at.komplexify on Instagram and @TravisKowalski
on Facebook.
The two social media platforms are filled with
vibrant, colorful drawings often accompanied by clever taglines – a bear
holding up a paw and asking, “I would like some salmon, please” and a praying
mantis playing a video game under the title, “Playing Mantis.”
Known on campus for his colorful Hawaiian shirts and
clever math-related ties, Kowalski is the professor whose office walls are covered
with unique visual art. He’s the kind of professor who sneaks his labradoodle Cauchy,
named after French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy, into class the last day
of the semester to play out an obscure (to the general audience at least)
mathematics joke. He’s the math teacher who so passionately talks about the
subject that even the least math-minded people can’t help but get excited.
And he’s good at what he does in the classroom. So
good that Kowalski was recently awarded the 2019 Burton W. Jones
Award by the Mathematical Association of America.
The award recognizes post-secondary level math instructors nationally who
“foster student excitement about mathematics.”
"It’s cool and humbling to be part of that group,” he admits.
Donald Teets, a Ph.D. professor in the Mines math
department, is a previous winner of the award and the person who nominated
Kowalski. In his nomination, Teets writes, “He is, (in this writer’s opinion)
the best teacher in a department devoted to teaching excellence.”
This is hardly the first recognition for Kowalski,
Teets says. In 2014, Kowalski was awarded the Benard Ennenga Award, which
honors one Mines faculty member each year for teaching excellence; and in
2017, he won the George Polya Award from the
Math Association of America for his College
Mathematics Journal article, “The Sine of a Single Degree.”
“His lecture based on ‘The Sine of a Single Degree’ is
as good a mathematics lecture as you will ever see!” Teets wrote in his
nomination.
Teets says the thing that makes Kowalski so good at
this job is his enthusiasm, noting that students consistently rate him on
classroom surveys as “the best math teacher I’ve ever had.” He’s “innovative,”
constantly striving to engage his students and utilize technology into his
teaching, Teets says. “Like Superman wears the big ‘S’ on his chest, Dr.
Kowalski deserves a big ‘I’ for Innovator.”
As for Kowalski’s artistic talents, Teets is equally
as effusive. “As a person who can barely draw recognizable stick figures, I am
in awe of Travis’s artistic abilities. It’s a great complement to his
extraordinary skills in mathematics!” he says.
Kowalski grew up in California, raised by a draftsman
father and a “crafty” stepmother. “My dad drew all of the time,” Kowalski says.
“That was the home I grew up in. You drew.”
In college at University of California, Riverside,
Kowalski majored in art. To finish off an academic requirement, he enrolled in Calculus
2. A good student in high school, he had already taken an advanced placement Calculus
1 class. He was class valedictorian, but “I worked hard at it. I was not a
prodigy,” he says with a laugh.
He still remembers the Riverside professor’s name who
taught his first college math course – Albert Stralka. He “taught in a way I
hadn’t seen before,” Kowalski says. “There were ideas behind the math.”
When he got an A in that class, the professor
convinced him to take Calculus 3.
Next, the professor suggested he take topology, which
is the study of geometric properties and spatial relations which are unaffected
by the change of shape or size of figures. “It’s the geometry of shapes under
change,” Kowalski says. “That class blew my mind.”
The rest is history – after topology Kowalski changed
his major and embraced a love of mathematics. But he never left his art behind,
and it’s important to understand that the two subjects go hand-in-hand, he
says. “Half of mathematicians do what they do because they think it’s pretty,”
he says of the geometry of math.
As a math professor at Mines, Kowalski admits that
“I still like to sit and draw things, but I don’t have as much time anymore,”
he says.
That’s where his morning squiggle drawings come
in.
Each one of Kowalski’s squiggles for his daughters takes
about 15 to 30 minutes from start to finish. “The first part is to see
something,” he says. He spins the napkin around, looking at the squiggle until
he “sees” the picture that will emerge.
Mia tends to draw extremely elaborate squiggles,
sometimes lobbying for a specific outcome – for instance a unicorn. Other
times, his daughters will bring home requests from friends for specific
drawings.
Liliana has saved all her napkins over the years,
storing them in a plastic container in her room. That made it a little easier
for Kowalski when she came to him recently to say, “What with my school
schedule being so busy and my lunch break so short and closet so full of the ones
you’ve already made me – which I love, thank you – I just don’t think you need
to make me lunch napkins anymore.” Kowalski playfully posted her words on
social media with an image from Boromir’s death from “Fellowship of the Rings” with
arrows sticking from his heart.
Kowalski says his older daughter relented, most likely
after an intervention from his wife, and is continuing to play the squiggle
game. He’s glad, hoping that both of his daughters will always remember the squiggle
game and maybe even carry it on with their own families one day.
“It’s definitely a great memory about my dad,” he
says. “Hopefully it will be the same for them.”