Guiding Mathematical Discovery: How We Started a Math Circle

Do school students need to wait until college-level mathematics or statistics before they can experience the true joy of mathematical discovery? By starting a Math Circle in the Northfield Middle School, we answered this question with a resounding “NO.” Our Math Circle, which we ran weekly during the Fall and Winter terms of 2019-2020, gave students a chance to approach math as mathematicians do: creatively and freely making mistakes, making discoveries, and asking new questions, all on their own terms. By letting students take the lead, we let them be the owners of their own mathematics, and helped them to experience the joy of mathematical exploration. Along the way, we exposed them to several of our favorite math topics, most of which are outside the usual public school curriculum; these included combinatorics, graph theory, probability, and cryptography. In our book, we will discuss the mathematics, motivations, and methods of our Middle School Math Circles. This book can is meant for anyone with a background in high school mathematics and can be used as a guide to run Math Circles