Go figure. Mathematics Professor Bob Hunt is this year's winner of the Outstanding Professor award at Humboldt State University, which will honor him with a medal at Commencement May 19.
Generations of students have crowded Hunt's relaxed classes for 25 years to hear him discourse in his West Texas twang on the "power, beauty and symmetry" of differential equations, exponential functions, explicit variables, Fourier coefficients and related topics in math.
As daunting as the subject sounds, Hunt's enthusiasm and informality win his students over.
"My students know I'm their advocate, not their adversary," he explains. "They know I'm on their side and have confidence in their ability."
Hunt was born to be a teacher. The child of two teachers, he grew up appreciating the clean air and wide open spaces of the Texas Panhandle, enjoying all subjects in school--double majoring in English and math--but knowing all along "I'd rather teach math because of its objectivity, as opposed to the subjective evaluations necessary in the humanities."
Having obtained his doctorate at the University of Utah at the age of 25, around the time that the Berlin Wall went up, Hunt fulfilled his military obligation at the NASA flight center in Alabama, working on space problems for rocket pioneer Werner von Braun.
"I was cheap labor and I didn't have to wear a uniform," he recalls.
Beginnings
In that post-Sputnik time of the early l960s, math teachers were in high demand, and Hunt took a good job at Southern Illinois University. But the urge to come to the West Coast brought him to the just-opened California State University in Bakersfield, where he became a charter faculty member and head of the math department.
Duties on the statewide academic senate showed him that "the more progressive people came from Humboldt State, and then I fell in love with Humboldt" as a visiting faculty member in 1975.
Hunt became a regular faculty member the following year and has taught at Humboldt State ever since, chairing the math department from 1987 to 1990, creating a contemporary math class for students ill at ease with the subject and generally teaching the calculus sequence--"the most fundamental math course at the college level."
Despite recent international surveys that conveyed negative images of mathematicians as scruffy and isolated, with wild eyes, holes in their clothes and equations scrawled on their arms, Hunt has a positive and easygoing manner that endears him to students. He has inspired many to go on to earn doctorates, and more than a few have become local high school and community college math teachers.
His teaching style is deceptively simple: "I don't intimidate students, I keep a relaxed atmosphere and I try to remove the mystique of math and inspire students with the beauty and power of the subject," he says.
"I call students by their first name and urge them to do the same. I'm friendly, open and fair, and believe that I show a sincere interest in their progress."
Zeal
After more than 40 years in the classroom, Hunt's zeal remains obvious. He enjoys teaching "because of a feeling of oneness I hold towards all people and because of the opportunity to open my students' minds to the beauty of mathematics inherent in its logic, its patterns, its structure and its fundamental role in science."
"I migrated to the California State University because teaching is my forte. I didn't want to publish or perish," he says, although his resume includes many articles, reviews and a textbook on his specialty, differential equations--the study of such variables as the velocity of a moving object or the area under a parabola.
Although he says he still likes to put in a lot of time preparing for his classes, and he carries a heavy teaching load, Hunt maintains diverse interests outside the classroom. He reads and writes extensively on philosophy and world religions, served on the Humboldt County Democratic central committee, co-chaired the local Jesse Jackson for President organization and acts as advisor to the campus Ultimate Frisbee team.
An avid backpacker, he also is a regular volunteer at Reggae on the River, has been a Little League coach and is a self-described Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan fanatic.
Then there is his large family, ten children--"my friends say, 'Bob sure knows how to multiply.'" The seven girls and three boys range in age from a 42-year-old poet to a 19-year-old freshman at Humboldt State. Not one is a mathematician.
He and his wife Bonnie also have six grandchildren.
Advocate
Hunt's love for math and "sincere interest in each student as an individual" are reflected back in high enrollments and the comments derived from student reviews. "Best teacher I've had" is a regular. (delete remainder of sentence). "Gentle" and "superflexible" also recur, as do clarity, fairness, effectiveness and approachability.
"It is an honor to study under someone who has such mastery of his craft," exclaimed one student, even though it also was "the most challenging course I have ever taken." Another said, "Bob does what only a good teacher is able to do: foster independent creative thinking in a student."
One student's review graced a wall as graffiti: "If you have to take calculus, take it from Bob Hunt."
His colleague Professor Charles Biles says Hunt's "work in the trenches" in what probably is the most difficult component of the math curriculum-the three-semester calculus sequence-is the likely reason for an 80 percent success rate at Humboldt State, compared to national statistics showing that more than half of Calculus I students fail.
Other colleagues call him a pillar of excellence, the best of the best, a conscientious adviser, meticulous and a master craftsman. He is able, said one, "to develop a difficult mathematical topic by first starting with an elementary idea and then carefully walking the audience through a well-designed sequence of steps that lead to an important and frequently deep mathematical result."
Hunt himself says, "I'm still a learner. Learning is my first love. A good teacher is always a learner, learning new ways to explain things.
"Teaching is like a language--never stale, always dynamic. I like to inspire students to stretch themselves."