HBHS Old Boy Finds His Place in the Sun

An outstanding Waikato mathematics graduate and HBHS Old Boy is spending the next two years in one of the most exuberant cities in the world.

Jethro van Ekeren gained his doctorate earlier this year at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston in the United States, and has now begun post-doctoral work at the Instituto Nacional de Matematicas Pura e Applicada in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

“I’m having to get my head around Portuguese – luckily I did a bit of Spanish at high school, which helps,” says the former Hamilton Boys High School student, who’ll be researching the complex algebras that lie at the interface of mathematics and theoretical physics.

At MIT, he completed his PhD under the supervision of Professor Victor Kac, who discovered one of the algebras Jethro is now working on. 

He’s also a keen amateur astronomer, although he didn’t get much opportunity to stargaze during his four years at MIT. “In Boston you have to drive for hours to get away from the light,” he says.

Jethro grew up in Auckland, Whangarei and Hamilton, and says he’s always been interested in maths. “When I was about 11, Mum started maths classes at the polytechnic in Whangarei and taught me some of the stuff she was learning – quadratics, graphing, that sort of thing. Then I started to get maths books out of the library.”

The turning point came when he had the opportunity to take part in the International Maths Olympiad. He was one of six senior high school students to represent New Zealand at the 2004 Maths Olympiad, held in Greece, winning a bronze medal for his efforts.

At the University of Waikato, he excelled with A+ grades in every paper he took for his honours degree. He also completed a summer research project in Sydney. “That project was useful preparation for MIT,” he says. “It was a first taste of what doing maths research is like – definitely valuable and a lot of fun.”

The experience helped win him a Fulbright – Ministry of Science and Innovation Graduate Award for his doctoral studies at MIT.

Jethro acknowledges the help he’s received from his honours year adviser Professor Ernie Kalnins and Dr Ian Hawthorne from Waikato University’s Maths Department. “Ian was the best maths teacher I’ve had since my high school teacher at Hamilton Boys High,” he says.