Thomas

I was born in East Yorkshire. Growing up, I spent my childhood between Yorkshire and Chile, where my mum’s from. Attending school in Chile, before I really learnt the language, maths was the subject I could still understand. Ever since it's been the subject I’ve gravitated towards, throughout school.

After coming back to England I attended Pocklington School, where I studied Maths, Further Maths and Spanish, achieving A*, A, A. As a school we competed in the UKMT teams challenge where myself and three others would go to various maths competitions and individually I scored in the top 100 students nationally.

From there I went on to study Pure Maths at Manchester achieving a first and after spending a year travelling and working on my Dad’s farm, I went back to university to do an MSc in Mathematical Physics at Durham, where I scored a distinction. I then returned to Chile to hitchhike down the country making it to Patagonia, where I spent some time living in my tent and all together being slightly uncomfortable, but loving every second of it.

Maths, however, is my passion and I’m now trying to get onto a PhD program to hopefully, one day, do research in the area of mathematical physics.

I try to bring the genuine love I have for my subject to all my classes, in an attempt to not just teach my students but also get them excited about the subject. Having worked with a range of abilities in the past I can push strong students, while helping others build up their mathematical confidence.

As a person who looks for maths in their everyday life, I try to bring up examples from everyday life to try to ground the students' ideas of the subject to real world applications. I’ve found many students think of maths as an abstract bunch of ideas and that they really benefit from seeing the subject in action in their daily lives.

Teachers can be one of the biggest factors in a child’s love (or hatred) of a subject. As such I take great care in trying to create a positive and warm environment to learn in.

I typically try to lead students, with questions and simpler examples, to help them build up their own intuition for problems. Once intuition has been built it makes the process of solving problems almost into a puzzle.

Once we’ve built up intuition, we can start to work on exam technique, i.e. how to layout your solutions or how to recognise what kind of problem we’re looking at.

I recently moved to London. I have ambitions to do a PhD in Quantum Field Theory/String Theory here in London. To further that aim I'm currently working on a project on compactifying an orbifold and deducing its effective action. Outside of that I play rugby and enjoy photography, which I use as a good way to explore the city.