BEAMing

Amy Harmon goes to math camp with a group of under-served students.

BEAM is short for Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, and this, the program’s first year of BEAM 6, for students who had just completed the sixth grade, is what many within elite math circles see as the most promising effort yet to diversify their ranks. The four weeks, spent in a school near City Hall, would be intense: four hours of math a day taught by 10 experienced math teachers, several of them Ph.D.’s. There would be no prepping for standardized tests or effort to cover school material at a faster pace. Instead, as in the elite summer programs that [director Daniel] Zaharopol had himself attended, BEAM focused on the kind of creative problem-solving that mathematicians say lie at the heart of the discipline.