The Math Academy Prequel: Jason Roberts’s Origin Story

by Justin Skycak (@justinskycak) on

What do Jeff Dean, Travis Kalanick, and a 6'7", 350lb mountain man who collaborated with John Conway have in common? They're part of Jason Roberts's origin story, shared for the first time.

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What do Jeff Dean, Travis Kalanick, and a 6’7”, 350lb mountain man who collaborated with John Conway have in common?

They’re part of Jason Roberts’s origin story, shared here for the first time.

If you know the Math Academy story—8th graders crushing AP Calc BC—this is the prequel.

Some highlights from the 50-minute podcast:

  • Jason went to high school with Jeff Dean (yes, that Jeff Dean). Both were mentored by Steve Sigur, their school's basketball coach -- a 6-foot-7, 350-pound mountain-man, who also happened to be a brilliant physicist with a knack for spotting and cultivating technical talent in students.
  • Steve was likely the first person to make the uncanny observation that "Jeff doesn't write bugs," decades before the Chuck-Norris-style Jeff Dean Facts became internet lore. He was also collaborating with mathematician John Conway on a book, which was put on hold following Steve's passing in 2008.
  • In the 90s, Jason was building high-frequency trading systems before "high-frequency trading" was even a term. He later coined the phrase "luck surface area" and lived it.
  • In 2010, Travis Kalanick called him and said, "I started this thing called UberCab, and you’re the CTO." This was back when Uber was literally two cars driving around San Francisco -- so early that Jason didn't want to "work for some cab company" 😂 and offered to consult instead.
  • Curtis Chambers would fly down from SF and stay at Jason's condo in Pasadena while they rearchitected Uber's real-time dispatch system, making it so unbelievably fast that people initially thought it was broken.
  • Jason ultimately walked away with enough capital to fund years of Math Academy content development. But Math Academy itself began almost accidentally, as yet another instance of luck surface area.
  • It started when Jason and his wife Sandy were "voluntold" to coach their son’s 4th-grade math field day team, which went so well that they continued through the next year as a pull-out class. By 5th grade, students were covering advanced algebra and even some calculus, and the incredible results caught the attention of the district superintendent, leading to an official pilot.
  • The Math Academy program expanded to a number of classes and was recognized by the Washington Post as America's most accelerated math program, taking 6th graders from basic arithmetic to passing the AP Calculus BC in 8th grade, followed by university math with PhD instructors in high school.
  • Jason built software to help him teach the classes effectively, and as the school program grew, so did the capabilities of the software. By the first fully remote school year of the pandemic, the Math Academy system outperformed conventional remote instruction. By the following year, it was even more effective than the original in-person model.
  • While schools across the world faced pandemic-related learning loss, Math Academy's students learned more then ever before. AP Calculus BC scores skyrocketed, with most students passing the exam and most students who passed receiving the maximum score possible (5 out of 5).

Follow-Up Questions

What is Math Academy up to nowadays?

We are scaling our online system, making available to the world the level of instruction that our Pasadena students experienced.

A rough timeline of the past few years:

  • 2022 - opened the system to the public
  • 2023 - hit operating break-even
  • 2024 - product-market fit
  • 2025 - got a bunch of new schools using the system, building out tons of new functionality to support them

We are working insane hours to expand the level mathematical talent development that we offered in Pasadena, and now we have students all over the world. Hundreds of countries. In fact, our youngest student to ace the AP Calc BC exam at 11 years old using our online system was outside the Pasadena program.

While we have turned our focus to the online system, the Pasadena program still operates using our system completely free of charge, and I personally taught in it all the way up until 2023. Part of my teaching involved developing the Eurisko program, an elective course sequence that we developed much later within the Math Academy school program, where we scaffolded students up to doing grad-level coursework, reproducing AI papers from scratch in Python.

The original Math Academy model is already available at scale – my Pasadena students were using Math Academy system for their math learning, the exact same system that we offer to the general public. And we are making progress towards offering the Eurisko curriculum (and much more) on the system as well.

More info here.


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