Sanjoy Mahajan, Associate Director for Teaching Initiatives
sanjoy@mit.edu

Sanjoy Mahajan obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1998, and has undergraduate degrees in mathematics from Oxford University and in physics from Stanford University. Due to his wonderful teachers, he became interested in improving science teaching, an interest he followed as a postdoctoral researcher and faculty member in the Physics Department at the University of Cambridge and as a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

His favorite course to teach is the "Art of Approximation in Science and Engineering", an undergraduate/graduate course for which he is writing a textbook that will be published in print form using a free-software license.

While at Cambridge, he helped start the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was the first Curriculum Director and taught the first courses in physics and computer science. There he wrote the (free) software to automate barcoding and cataloguing the 5,000 donated books that started the Institute's library.

In an earlier life, he did research in computer game-playing, co-authoring a world-championship level Othello program, BILL. His interests in science teaching and in how artificial and natural minds work make him a happy member of the Teaching and Learning Laboratory, which he joined in July 2006 as Associate Director for Teaching Initiatives.

In January 2007, Dr. Mahajan was named a Lecturer in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.