The book The Celestine Prophecy is more readily associated with spiritual retreats and yoga mats than calculus.

But for Dr Geillan Aly, it was the gateway to a lifetime of mathematics.

Hungry for meaning, fresh out of university in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she stumbled upon those books that are not part of the syllabus, as she describes them, and read New Age philosophy for a while.

But seeking to investigate how much truth there was behind the spiritual notion of energy, she moved on to other books – into science, rather than more New Age.

Re-enrolling at university in her late 20s to learn physics and maths was the natural progression. However, she had to choose one as she couldn’t afford to study both.

“I thought: math is universal. That brought me back to thinking about high school, my teacher, and to realising that I had been using math to solve problems in my daily life and my jobs,” she recalls.

“And math is probably the closest we can get to understanding our universe. That brings us closer to God, our purpose, and everything else.”

Not a maths person

Dr Aly was born in Giza, Egypt, and migrated to the US with her family when she was less than a year old. “Education was something my parents valued tremendously. That’s why we came to the US,” she explains.

Growing up in Queens, New York, she remembers being bullied while she was going to public school. “From a very young age, I learned about how people can treat you in a way that makes you feel unwelcome,” she says. She also soon found out that maths was something she liked and was good at. In high school, she took AP calculus; Ms Pellegrino, her maths teacher, used to tell her she should pursue maths at university.

But at university she didn’t pick maths. She ended up majoring in history with a focus on the Middle East to learn more about her roots instead, and started working in the publishing industry.

When she left her career in her 30s to go back to university, while tutoring on the side to support herself, not everyone was on board with the idea.

“I once told somebody that I was quitting my job to go back to school and study math. And their response was – ‘Seriously? You are not a math person. What are you talking about? Do you even remember the quadratic equation?’,” she recalls.

That ‘you are not a maths person’ was an attitude she’d find more frequently than she would have liked.

And she did remember the quadratic equation. “Of course I did,” she says. “Ms Pellegrino taught it to me!”

Feeling awful at maths

A Mathematics Degree and a Master’s were, unsurprisingly, a challenge. Dr Aly recalls working extremely hard and passing her exams, but support and most importantly recognition were a mixed bag.

Sometimes, she’d get straight discouragement, she says.

“When I said ‘I really want to study mathematics, understand the nature of mathematics, go to graduate school, and get a PhD’, some people were like, ‘nope, nope’.

“Some people told me, ‘You are not going to fit in. The level of effort and fighting that you're going to put in is not worth it’,” she recalls.

As discouragement piled up, self-doubt crept in. Her mental health took a hit. She had gotten through a mathematics undergraduate degree while working, had completed a master’s and was working on her PhD, but she was feeling incapable – and “awful at maths”.

“I felt worthless. I felt suicidal. It was awful – all of my self-worth was tied up in all this and how well I was doing in it.”

Eventually, she started working with a professor in the College of Education, and that is where she completed her PhD, with a thesis on computer-centred maths learning.

Healing

A first glimpse of her future work came when she started teaching maths in a community college during graduate school, and she witnessed students walking into the first maths class already declaring they were going to fail.

“And I hadn’t even given them the syllabus yet!” she recalls.

“These kids walked in with the horror stories of their experiences. I heard my experiences a million times worse.”

She realised she wasn’t alone, and this eventually led her to work on maths trauma, which she defines as the previous experiences that contribute to students disengaging from mathematics.

“Open a door to equity and social justice. Open a door to learning about inequitable school funding based on zip code and income in the US. Open a door to biases around ‘people of colour don't do math’ and ‘women don't do math’,” she explains.

“Think about all the subconscious messaging that girls get about their abilities. Think about the perceived and implicit bias – all this opens a huge world.”

Maths trauma and maths anxiety have been highlighted in the literature and other work as the negative experiences, borne out of a mix of misconceptions, elitism and discrimination, including racism and sexism, that can impact students and cause negative feelings towards maths.

For example, the author of the 1978 book Overcoming Maths Anxiety, Sheila Tobias, wrote in an article, as reported by The Harvard Gazette, that maths anxiety “is a serious handicap.”

She wrote: “It is handed down from mother to daughter with father’s amused indulgence. (‘Your mother never could balance a checkbook,’ he says fondly.)”

There is evidence that girls tend to have higher levels of maths anxiety, as highlighted in UNESCO's 2024 Gender Report.

For Dr Aly, maths trauma can have a more pervasive impact than maths anxiety.

“Math trauma can take shape in a number of different ways, including math identity, thinking you're ‘not a math person’, or imposter syndrome. Even thinking you're ‘a faker’ and can't legitimately do math – for example, when students succeed in math and attribute that success to luck,” she explains.

Empowering students

In 2021, Dr Aly created Compassionate Math to work with students and teachers who experienced maths trauma.

While working with students came naturally, she wrestled with the idea of doing professional development for teachers for a while.

“A professor walking in and telling a teacher what’s what is disrespectful,” she says.

She decided to adopt a different attitude: that of a researcher. And while listening to students and teachers, she met learners who had given up on maths and were even no longer trying, and educators who were afraid of the very subject they were meant to teach.

Working to widen access to maths for both students and teachers feels particularly urgent because, as she insists, maths is not an option. At the very least, she says, we need to have a decent level of algebra.

“We need to know mathematics to survive. We need to learn it, not just pass it.

“In a society run by algorithms, statistics and data science, if you don't know math, then you are just being carried away by the tides.”

At every level of education, the bottom line of Dr Aly’s work is that we can all learn maths.

To embody this view, she says, educators need to give students agency and power. She advocates for active mathematics in class, using inquiry-based, student-centred active learning.

And, she insists, teachers need to be curious and open-minded about students’ experiences with learning maths – especially the emotional aspects. Being aware of maths trauma also means giving students the language to talk about their feelings and their experiences with maths learning.

“Ask them about who they are and what their past experiences learning math were,” she says.

“Because if they tell you that their teacher threw a chair across the room because the class failed their fractions exam – I've gotten stories like that – or they kept telling them how stupid they all were for not getting it, then you need to pause,” she says.

Telling stories about the history of maths is also important – not only to make the lesson more rounded, but also to make maths more inclusive, because the history of maths touches on several countries and cultures around the world.

“If you have a student of a different heritage in the classroom and you tell them about their rich history, that’s another way to show them they are mathematical as well,” she explains.

Cheerleading for all

Dr Aly’s aptitude to recognise and fight against gatekeeping is not restricted to maths.

“As a person of colour who's working in the space of equity, it's very easy for me to recognise and acknowledge when an environment is just putting on a good face of supporting equity,” she says.

Some aspects of the job application in the higher education sector can still work as a gatekeeper, she says. One of them is the practice of requiring letters of recommendation.

“Imagine the female graduate student who can't stand up to her harassing advisor because she has to be nice so she can get the recommendation. Or the one who does and now gets bad letters without her knowing. Letters are a good way to keep barriers up,” she says.

“I want to start advocating for no letters of recommendation at all, or if you have to have letters, then say they don’t need to be from traditional academic sources.”

Other elements to change, she explains, include negative attitudes towards different educational backgrounds.

“If you say ‘I only want to hire somebody from [an Ivy League university]’, that population is probably not extremely diverse. And if you say ‘Somebody who got a degree in a community college isn't worth a tenure line’, then how are you going to diversify your faculty?”

Diversity training could help – but it needs to be “like therapy,” she says, adding that coming to terms with one’s own bias is hard work.

The most important sign that an institution really values diversity, she concludes, is how faculty treat students: “If they are cheerleaders towards all students – not just ‘those students’, or the students who work hard or those who try – then it’s a good sign.”