The captivating beauty of mathematical theory entices Professor Winston Ou to spend countless hours searching for answers.
“Working so hard has its own pleasure,” says Ou, an associate professor of mathematics. “With hard, hard, hard work, one might make some tiny progress in one’s understanding. That uncertain, tiny bit of progress has always been enough to lure me onwards.”
Though numbers guided the trajectory of his career from his years as an undeclared major at Princeton to Scripps where he now teaches mathematics, Ou nurtured many interests as a child, but math was not high on that list.
Raised in both North Carolina and Virginia, Ou’s most enjoyable childhood hobby was reading, which he still relishes today. He also plays the cello and piano and practices martial arts. Ou grew up in a bicultural home that encouraged him to always think for himself.
“My parents came from Taiwan in the 60s for graduate school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where they met. That’s my cultural background—the intersection of America and old Taiwan,” he says.
As a child, Ou’s father gave him a book of square roots and logarithms, years before pocket calculators were ubiquitous. Ou spent hours flipping through that book, looking up square roots out of curiosity.
“Back then, if you needed a square root, you looked it up in a book,” he says. “Later, we got a calculator, and I plugged in these values and squared them, and found that they were incorrect. I started trying to get better approximations, just by trial and error.”
As a freshman at Princeton, he pursued his fondness for English literature. However, his first math class opened his eyes to new possibilities. “Through that math course, I immediately realized that what I had previously considered to be mathematics was, in fact, not mathematics at all,” Ou says. “Math turned out to be something completely different: theory, concepts, proofs, and intuition.”
He debated on a major because he loved English so much. “I went to one of my English professors for advice during my sophomore year when I was deciding on my major. He wrote down for me the last line of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics: “‘Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt,'” Ou says. “In English, that translates to, ‘All that is excellent is as difficult as it is rare’—and that encouraged me to keep going in math.”
After receiving a doctorate degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Ou attended Osaka University in Japan for a summer on a research project through the National Science Foundation and Monbusho Summer Institute Program, the first of many subsequent visits to the island nation.
“I became interested in Japan because of martial arts: when young, I dreamed of going there to practice,” says Ou, who spent a few days last year at Ibaraki University, on Japan’s southeastern coast, as an invited guest.
Today, he continues to create balance in his life. In addition to being a popular professor who enthusiastically delves into the complexities of mathematical theory, he teaches the Japanese martial art Aikido at the Sallie Tiernan Field House. Every Wednesday afternoon, he meets with students to chat with them during Scripps’ weekly teas in Seal Court.
“Our students are the best thing about being a professor at Scripps,” Ou says. “Each Scripps student is special in some way. Getting to know the students and, ideally, helping them to use their abilities to the fullest, is a real pleasure.”