The Rate of Change

This is the story of how mathematics turned my life around.

The Rate of Change

This is the story of how mathematics turned my life around. In my darkest moment, sitting in a prison cell at twenty years old, mathematics called to me and promised me a life beyond the cage I was in. This blog chronicles my journey from learning math in isolation, to publishing research papers, to my future plans and goals within mathematics. My ultimate hope is that someone, somewhere reads these words and believes that change is possible. Because change is possible.

By Travis Cunningham

This blog series originated as a project with the Prison Math Project, and some of the posts have benefitted from editing by Emile Dultra.

  • I felt like I was on top of the world. I had just discovered the final lemma needed to prove a major theorem providing a new bound on the number of resonances on hyperbolic surfaces. But the sound of steel doors opening…

  • Mathematics has always made me feel like I’m connecting with something bigger than my own life. Every time I sit down and engage in my mathematical investigations, I feel I’m peering beyond the boundaries of physical reality, into something infinitely more. Mathematics…

  • Dawn

    For the first four years of my sentence, I worked to learn mathematics in total isolation. It was my safe, lonely hiding place away from the nightmare in my head and all around me, where I could vent all my frustrations and…

  • Imagine finding your passion in life and then being unable to discuss it with anyone who shares that passion. That’s what the beginning of my math journey was like. After several years devoted to mathematics, I could see the transformation it was…

  • Awake in the middle of the night, angling my book to catch what little light streamed in from the cell window… I can’t sleep, not until I understand the expansion of scattered waves in term of resonances. The brief joy might be…

  • There are certainly people here who fit every single stereotype for the violent convict. But the truth is that many of the people I’ve met in my 10 years in prison are kind, have interests and loved ones. Most importantly, they recognize…

  • Those first few days in prison were pure hell, as I finally had the chance to process the previous year of my life, and to face the reality of the long sentence ahead. I was barely 20 years old, but it felt…

  • My name is Travis Cunningham and I’m here to share my story.  ‍I am, first of all, a mathematician. I study scattering resonances, which is a subfield of partial differential equations. I recently published my first paper, in collaboration with my mentor, on…