This post is the first in an ongoing series of stories about our personal relationships with mathematics. We introduced this series in a recent post. Today’s math story is from Allison Hamburger, a member of the Desmos engineering team.

My math story is all about counting.

As a computer science major in college, I developed the habit of noting the exact number of people I perceived as women in a classroom. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in my math and computer science classes, there were often only a handful, sometimes even in a large lecture hall. In classes further outside of my major, that wasn’t the case.

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Our stories are important for shaping our identities. What kind of person am I? Where do I belong? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is my purpose? These are profound questions that we often use stories to answer.

Our mission at Desmos is to help all students love math and love learning math. We acknowledge the complexities of that mission, and we understand the responsibility inherent in building tools that play a role in shaping every student’s math story.

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