It is with great sadness that G4G notes the death of Andy Liu
(March 15, 1947—March 26, 2024).
We are collecting here some recollections from various members of the G4G community. If you have any anecdotes, memories, or tributes that you would like to share, please email us at support@g4gfoundation.org.
“Andy’s desire to excite students about mathematics took many forms. In Edmonton, he was a popular speaker in schools, organized math fairs, and directed summer mathematics camps. For years he drew groups of enthusiastic junior high students to his free weekly Saturday Math Club. He lured them with tantalizing problems (many original and unsolved) and encouraged their own ingenuity in solving them. Locally, nationally, and internationally, he was a devoted supporter of mathematics competitions, serving as coach and leader for Putnam and IMO teams, chair of the Problem Section of the IMO, and vice-president of the international Mathematics Tournament of the Towns.”
– Adapted from the citation of the Haimo award which Andy won in 2004.
I met Andy at one of the early Gatherings for Gardner. He was a brilliant math educator, perhaps more than anyone he understood how to integrate concepts of recreational mathematics into curriculum for young students. And he brought these ideas into beautiful practice. What I loved most about Andy were his personal characteristics… his kindness, his warmth, his humor, his generosity. If ever I traveled to a conference or convention and Andy was there, visiting with him would always be a highlight of that trip. BIRS conferences were always highlights!
Andy often used Binary Arts/Thinkfun games in his Math Club, and he sometimes brought them to human scale. He would mark off the game board on the floor, have students stand on the board to become puzzle tokens. Rush Hour was Andy’s favorite, though he had success with many of our puzzles. With Lunar Lockout, he had each student carry a length of rope, then explained that the player must toss their rope to another player and pull them back – this is brilliant!
What always stood out most for me was Math Fair. As Andy described it, in May 1997 he was challenged by an elementary school vice principal with the question, “I know about Science Fair. But is there such a thing as Math Fair?”. “Yes there is”, Andy immediately replied, then took on the task to invent and help organize the first one. You can read about this story in Andy’s own words here.
Andy’s vision was to elevate student participants from puzzle solvers to become puzzle makers, while introducing a menu of the best recreational math puzzles for students to embrace as their own. Over time Andy and his colleagues at the U. of Alberta built SNAP Math Fair into a full program that enjoyed modest success for a number of years across Canada and the USA. The Math Fair website is still active today.
I wish this program had somehow blossomed into an international success, it’s one of the best efforts ever. Certainly it is a very tough environment out there in math education which is something that Andy knew well.
We’ll miss you Andy.
– Bill Ritchie
Thinkfun/Binary Arts co-founder
I was very sad to find Andy’s passing on his Wikipedia page. I collaborated with Andy on math competition problem solving for years, but I only met him once, a few months before his passing. He invited me to Shenzhen Middle School, where (he told me that) he donated quite a few tons of math books and now they become a small library next to the headmaster’s office. There are many Martin Gardner books and other puzzle books there. It is a pity that I could only stay there for two days before saying goodbye to him and his books, but I didn’t expect that this would turn into a farewell forever.– Haoran Chen
I visited Andy last fall (of 2023) in Edmonton where we had lunch at a restaurant and then spent some time at his apartment. He was in very poor health, but intellectually very alive. He had stacks of puzzles and insisted I take some home. He was especially proud of the matching shapes puzzles that had been invented by young people. He was an inspiration to hundreds, if not thousands of young bright budding mathematicians. In addition to being a leader in various mathematical competitions globally, he had a lively Saturday Math Club for middle schoolers in Edmonton in which he encouraged them to solve problems. In the early 1980s I was editor of Mathematics Magazine, and received a submission from one of Andy’s eighth grade Saturday Math Club students. It was a charming write-up of the solution of a problem, lacking the more formal style of an article written by a mathematician. We made the editorial decision to publish it exactly as the student wrote it.Andy communicated with me over the years, reporting on his many travels for math competitions, and often sending me discoveries by his students or one of his own drafts for publication. He once asked me to contribute an article for the publication Mathematics for Gifted Students, which I did, focusing on the technique of “Counting It Twice” to prove combinatorial and other identities. That article ended up having a life of its own due to Andy, being reprinted in an MAA journal and also translated into Chinese for publication in Mathematics Olympiad. Andy was a good friend and colleague, and exuded the joy of mathematics. I’ll miss him.– Doris Schattschneider
Above is a photo of Andy with Tom from 2008 (G4G8). He was at many of the early G4G’s. From what I remember, he was the one that introduced Tanya Thompson to the Gatherings, and also some other people.
– Mark Settaducatti