I had picked up some flower sticks at the Ohio Renaissance Festival and it really made sense to me.  Once graduated, I tried college but it wasn’t quite right at the time.  So I did what any young energetic person would do, I left my belongings and headed to Wisconsin to join the Renaissance Festival circuit.  I learned Poi, Diabolo, Juggling, Contact Juggling, Acrobatics, and much more.  I traveled the US from 2002 - 2005 teaching at festivals all over the country before I was picked up by youth circus’s near Boston MA. In the summer of 2004 I started teaching and performing with the Open Air Circus in Somerville MA.  At this point, my mother convinced me to return to school in Ohio and be the son she wanted, rather than a traveling circus performer and teacher, living out of a van.

 

At Ohio State University, I found that I was totally ready for their challenges.  I had spent 4 years living at my own pace and really learned how to play.  So when back in school, I got focused and I learned how to work.  I quickly got caught up with the material being covered in my first math class (Algebra III) and discovered that if I taught myself the next math class, I could test out of it!  For the last 6 weeks of my 10 week class, I studied double duty and taught myself Trigonometry and Precalculus (a class in which I was a TA 2 years later).  My instructors were always encouraging but the math department was not happy when I showed up to take the test.  I was discouraged to take it but I did it and I passed.  So they gave me credit.

 

This cycle repeated and I taught myself Calculus II and III.  At which point, rather than discouraging me, a professor took me aside and suggested that I try the honors math program.  Again, when I approached the math department, I was discouraged from attempting the series but I did it and I succeeded.

 

When I finally took multivariable calculus, it all came together.  I had spent 5 years working very hard on my prop manipulation and it clicked well with multivariable calculus.  I realized that I had been imagining the motion of the objects traveling through space and time.  This is exactly what they were asking me to do in class now: imagine things moving through space and time.  Needless to say, this was a winning combination and mathematics were mostly a breeze for me from that time forward.

 

During this time in school, I was introduced to “Alien” Jon Everett who really tuned me into the Poi.  Jon had been studying the Poi intensively for a number of years and was one of the founders of the “tech-poi” movement, which is very much alive today.  I had learned a number of simple moves from a 12 year old girl in Wisconsin in 2002 but didn’t grasp the full splendor of what the prop has to offer.  The initial learning curve is very low.  You can be spinning and having fun in 30 mins.  This also allows deep variations and above average controllability for a prop.  Jon later worked on Poi simulations and we discussed these in great detail together.

 

 

Near the very end of my B.S. in physics at Ohio State, I traveled to Connecticut to go to the WildFire Retreat.  This is a prop manipulation workshop weekend for 20 and 30-somethings.  While there I met Ben Drexler, a very skilled poi artist just on the brink of changing the scene.  Drex asked me to show him how to do Poi mathematics.  He asked what equations he would need, what functions plot it out, how can he manipulate them, etc.  I answered him, we had a solid 45 - 60 min conversation with a piece of paper and a promise to keep in touch.

 

I headed to Arizona to start graduate school in physics at ASU.  In Tempe, I found a world of circus waiting for me to explore it and grow into a performer closer to the one I am today.  I worked hard at my studies during the day and I worked hard at my play at night.  Costumes, Statistical Mechanics, Makeup, Quantum Field Theory, Juggling, and General Relativity became my worlds.  Eventually I moved to Raleigh to work at NC State and Duke on research involving measuring quantum spin states of particles at superfluid helium temperatures using nuclear magnetic resonance.

 

Over the following years, Drex and I communicated over email, phone, meetups, and facebook to further discuss poi-math topics.  He had started teaching other people poi-math and they really like it.  He once told me that he actually believed he was bad at math before he learned poi-math.  I’m honored to know that I was able to catalyze the connections with him and open this beautiful new world.  In 2014 he made public a 75 pg document entitled “A Mathematical Approach to Classifying Poi Patterns”.   This was a great inspiration to me as a teacher and as a poi enthusiast.

 

That summer when we found ourselves at a few prop festivals together, we discussed the paper in greater detail and I proposed this camp idea to him.  He has extensive experience teaching poi and sharing the math associated with it but hadn’t spent as much time teaching the full spectrum of mathematics as I.  Neither had he taught or organized youth summer camps.  Again I had.  We worked on the project together for a while but he was taken by greater responsibilities to continue accelerating the scope of Poi in the world.

 

Knowing that I now have the chance to share the connection I see between the world and math class, knowing that there are other people out there who might think they are bad at math simply because they haven’t had the right teacher to open it up for them, knowing that I have the skills and experience to share this with them, I had to persist.

 

This brings us to the present.  Welcome to Kinetics of Math.”

 

— Adam Dipert