In the early morning hours at The Grad Club in Middlesex College, Martin Pinsonnault drinks his first coffee of the day. To anyone else, a coffee meeting might be an everyday occurrence, but Pinsonnault sees it differently.
“We live in a four-dimensional space,” he says. “So take for example meeting each other here. You have to specify a location; that’s one dimension. The place is at an intersection of two streets – another dimension. The floor of the building – that’s the third dimension. And then you have to specify the time, otherwise we would miss each other.”
Pinsonnault is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at The University of Western Ontario and studies pure mathematics and differential geometry. He says studying math has changed the way he views the world.
“The job of mathematicians is to find ways to explain very basic principles in simple ways and convince people that once you understand these things you are stronger; it empowers you,” he says.
His position at Western is his first permanent teaching job. But he says he has another job, as a “taxi driver” for his three children.
When he’s not driving his children to music lessons or hockey games, he enjoys playing and composing music.
The family has lived in London since the summer of 2008 and has relocated three times for Pinsonnault’s career. Before Western, he spent the last year in Montreal teaching and five years before that studying in Toronto.
“For them it’s a bit hard. For young people, changing schools is never easy, so I did have to think about this for a while. We were thinking for a while I would come first and the family would stay in Montreal,” he says. “Going outside of Quebec is really like going to a foreign country.”
Pinsonnault grew up in Saint-Hyacinthe, a small agriculture-based town between Montreal and Quebec City. When he was seven years old, he was interested in technical projects and wanted to be an engineer and construct planes.
He then became interested in physics and realized that to understand how things worked, he needed to understand math. But his first experiences with the subject didn’t inspire him.
“I didn’t like math at that time. I found it very boring,” he says.
Pinsonnault went to primary and secondary school in Quebec and says the education system requires students to choose three subjects to specialize in for two years before university. He chose math, physics and music.
“Usually in math class, the first thing people think about is ‘how will I escape the class?'” he says.
“But I was in this class of 33 people and everyone agreed to add an extra hour of lectures a week and in this extra hour the professor gave lectures on different subjects and aspects of math and it was very surprising. You meet a single individual sometimes and things change.”
Pinsonnault did his undergraduate work at the Université de Montreal and his graduate work at the University of Toronto and the Fields Institute of Mathematics in Toronto.
Yael Karshon, a math professor at the University of Toronto, worked with Pinsonnault during his time in Toronto.
“In our joint work, all the main breakthroughs were due to him,” Karshon says. The pair wrote a paper together on symplectic manifolds, which are mathematical objects developed from geometrical approaches to physics.
“I have huge professional respect for him and I see him as a powerful mathematician,” she says.
As a mathematician, Pinsonnault says it’s hard to teach a subject that many students struggle with or don’t enjoy.
“People get angry about math and say this is the subject that’s made me fail or my mark is too low,” he says. “Not many people get exposed to real math unless they are really lucky and you meet someone who can explain it to you, which is what happened to me, or you persist and finally in time you get more interested and involved.
Factbox:
Last book read: Trois Nouvelles by Georges Simenon
Favourite composers: Bach, Mozart, Debussy
Favourite singer: Georges Brassens
The writer is a graduate student in Journalism. This feature profiles faculty members hired over the past two years.