Chester Thai ’14: In the midst of writing his dissertation for his Ph.D. in economics, Adam Lavallee, Upper School math teacher, recently published a problem in the magazine Mathematics Teacher.
Entitled “Chocolatefinger,” Lavallee’s problem used an excerpt from a 2011 New York Times article about “an investor that bought a lot of cocoa.” The article begins, “To some, he is a real-life Willy Wonka. To others, he is a Bond-style villain bent on taking over the world’s supply of chocolate. In a stroke, a hedge fund manager here named Anthony Ward has all but cornered the market in cocoa. By one estimate, he has about enough to make more than five billion chocolate bars.”
An excerpt from Lavallee’s problem set reads, “Assuming that Ward can make five billion chocolate bars each containing between one percent and eleven percent cocoa, what is the minimum and maximum amount of cocoa he needs to produce these chocolate bars?” Lavallee explained “They’re all problems you could do in Algebra 2. It deals with percentages; it deals with systems of equations; it’s also a problem regarding supply and demand.”
Lavallee began teaching at Episcopal in 2008 and started taking night classes for his Ph.D in Econcomics in the fall of 2009. He is currently writing his dissertation on unemployment insurance.
He recalled, “I was a math major in college and realized that what I really liked about math was the applications.”
When asked to explain his dissertation, he replied, “Essentially what the problem comes down to is a full-page long math problem to solve, and it’s something that you can’t really solve using algebraic techniques, or even calculus techniques. You have to use a computer to simulate and see what optimal results are.” He mentioned that it was similar to linear optimization in pre-calculus, except, “It’s not linear, and there are twelve or thirteen variables and a lot of different parameters that could change.”
Lavallee stated, “Any student that I’ve taught, especially in pre-calculus or calculus, knows that I like to do problem sets, and a lot of time the problems that I give are not mechanical problems, they’re just applications of the material. This section [of Mathematics Teacher], and my contribution to it, takes articles from newspapers and magazines and applies math problems to them.”
Dr. Thomas Goebeler, Upper School math teacher and former professor at Ursinus University, agrees with Lavallee, stating, “Every once in a while, when you’re teaching a course, or more likely, two different courses, you start to notice that these courses have really different descriptions, but there is an item common to both. The most recent publication I wrote was just that: a piece of graduate level mathematics that was always rolling around in my head, and then a business-calculus application. I’d been thinking about it for a while but had never actually sketched it out. [When I did], I realized I could apply one to the other.”
Kelly Dunphy, Upper School geometry teacher, noted “I think it’s awesome that Mr. Lavallee is being recognized for his ability to come up with high school level problems that are applicable to real world problems. Students grow so accustomed to the generic word problems they see in math textbooks that they forget that their ability to think their way through problems and apply the math they’ve learned in the classroom …[math is] actually extremely useful and necessary.”
In terms of where he sees himself in the future, Lavallee stated, “I really like teaching math. I’m going to keep doing so as well as teach economics because, at the college level, economics is just applications of math. When students ask in class, ‘Why are we doing this? Why do we solve a systems of equations?’…There actually are economic applications that use it.”
Lavallee would also like to help those with innumeracy, or illiteracy in math. He stated, “I have another problem coming out in November that involves the question of which would a consumer prefer: thirty-three percent off the original price or thirty-three percent more of a product.” According to Lavallee marketers take advantage of the average consumer’s innumeracy, and his new problem, to be published next November, will help those who, as Lavalle said,“don’t take advantage of the best deal.”

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