 He's got an MS and MSc, a PhD. And as a student in the Harvard Graduate Program in Nanotechnology, he's a board member of Johns Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, board member of Keystone College, a founding about board member of the Lyme Navigator Foundation, an advisory board member of the Rutgers Institute for Emergency Preparedness and Homeland Security, and a board member of MoMath. He is currently studying the applications of nanotechnology to the problem of brain activity, measurement, and recording. And he's a great guy. David Tarak. Are these guys great or what? Yeah! Woo! I've been introduced for a lot of things before, but I gotta say nobody ever did it that well or it had that much fun with it, including me. Let me set this up. So is everybody having fun? Yeah? All right. You can't hear me. Can you hear me now? Yeah, okay. Okay, there we go. Okay, we're welcome. Pew Research tells us that math students in the United States rank an unimpressive 30th out of the 35 countries of the OECD. 30th. Macau, Estonia, Norway, Slovenia, Iceland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Slovenia, and yes, the Russians are all beating the pants off of us in math. This is, as you might expect, seriously bad news for our country. The National Bureau of Economic Research finds that unconscious biases of grade school teachers frequently sideline mathematically talented young women before they ever reach high school. And according to a recent study by the American Educational Research Association, 12 years, 12 years after programs were started, to eliminate gender bias and encourage young women into STEM disciplines, we have made scant little progress, particularly in our rural areas. If that isn't bad enough, if you study the cartoons and the media aimed at our young, and all too common theme, is that it's cool to be stupid, right? Yes, you heard that right. That math and science people or geeks and nerds and the cool people are the degenerate, non-contributive, narcissistic, arrogant, rude people, right? It's cool to be stupid. Seriously, study some of the cartoons and things that are out there and some of the things that are in social media. It can be a bit shocking. If you put the pieces of this puzzle together and you have a perfect storm for a national catastrophe, the Russians and the Chinese don't need to and won't need to invade our shores, they're overtaking us through our own culture and social media, as we've seen in the news lately, right? Things that we invented, things that we invented. Their youth have taken over our, overtaken ours, excuse me, in mathematics and their gaining ground in science and technology and engineering. So the next war isn't likely to be fought with conventional weapons, could be, but it's not likely. The next war will be fought on an economic battleground and it'll be one with mathematics and science and innovation, right? So clearly we need to do something to stem the rising tide, excuse the pun, before it's too late. The National Museum of Mathematics, Mo Math, is a key part of that solution, key part. So in 2009, my foundation was studying ways to arrest the spread of terrorism. And education was at the time and still is a principal focus of ours. So you can imagine my delight when I first met Glenn Whitney and Cindy Lawrence in October of 2009. Glenn and Cindy were the perfect combination of visionary and implementer. Priggs Myers would probably tag him and INFP to her ESTJ, right? Perfect complementarity of dynamic duo out to save the world. And they told me their story that night we first met and what they intended to accomplish and they said their mission was to make math cool for everyone. To bring back basically the excitement for stem disciplines and things that our country experienced in the 1960s with the space race and all the rest, right? And also to expand the national talent pool to include minorities and women. Well first I didn't believe it. It sounded too good to be true and you know how those things usually turn out, right? Things that sound too good to be true usually are. So the following week in my insistence, we flew out to Allentown, Pennsylvania to see what they'd put together so far, which at the time was a traveling, kind of mini museum of exhibits that they would pack up in a truck and they'd roll it out to a school or a local civic center or something like that and it would move about from town to town. That was as far as it had gone at that point. And once there, I saw kids swarming the exhibits. It's the best description. They were like bees just all over it, right? Just swarming the exhibits, interacting with them, playing loudly and boisterously and learning. Yeah, they were learning, they were learning. This was not what I expected. It was not a museum with a picture of Leibniz on the wall and a dry description of why calculus was important to medicine or science or something like that. It was a living connection between math and the real world. The world that we all live in that we touch and we breathe every day. Well, I got it, I got it. I could see it right there. My team got it, the people I'd brought with me to tour this got it. It was clear that this was worth supporting in a big way. Then was the challenge, well, okay, so how do we scale this up? And the challenge was on, right? With the later edition of Tim Nissen, who you've seen tonight, our chief creative officer, many, many creative compelling exhibits were designed. Tim's design, for those of you who don't know, Tim's designed all kinds of exhibits in his career, even led some of the renovations at the American Museum of Natural History. If you stop by the museum any day and you'll see Tim sort of everywhere interacting with visitors and figuring things out, or if you attend a math festival, you're likely to find Tim sort of sitting across the leg in the corner with some people, figuring out how to make compelling exhibits and make the whole thing more interesting to them. Tim works tirelessly to make new exhibits and experiences to captivate the masses. I really can't say enough about how much and how critical Tim has been to our success and how much we appreciate him on the team. Tim, wherever you are, take a bow. He's also humble as the day is long, so he's probably off somewhere. Let's see, so Cindy also assumed her current role as executive director in 2015. And for the past three years, we've watched as she has taken momath from a popular regional attraction to a world-recognized leader in math outreach. She's recruited a technology team that's second to none, forged partnerships with science centers and other museums around the country, established collaborations with researchers and mathematicians from top universities, and places all around the world. Cindy's creativity, inspiration, mathematical sensibility, they've all been a driving force behind the museum's ongoing success. So, Cindy, thank you, Tim, thank you. We'll celebrate our fifth anniversary, December 12th of this year. Glenn Whitney's vision of a permanent National Mathematics Museum is a reality. We're North America's only cultural institution devoted to mathematics, and we're Manhattan's only hands-on science center. So if you haven't visited yet, please do. It is truly a wondrous place. I sneak in there from time to time, don't tell anybody I'm a board member and just go sit in the corner and start playing with things and working with kids and things. It's wonderful. It's truly a wondrous place. So what have we accomplished? Well, first, if you visit the museum on any weekday, you'll see wide-eyed, deeply engaged kids. They'll tell you that the place is cool, that the math behind it is cooler, and that they're cool because they get this stuff. Had a young kid tell me that last time we were there. I'm cool because I get this stuff, right? All right, so for the adults in the room, what have we accomplished in numeric terms? If you include the main museum, our remote exhibits, the evening programs, and the other things that we do with adults, over two million people have participated in one or more of our program offerings. Two million people. We've revealed the wonders of mathematics to more than 8,000 students from underserved schools who visit the museum each year. MoMath has been named the number one great thing to do this weekend, and the most fascinating museum in New York State worth driving to go see, worth traveling for. In 2016 alone, MoMath was named in various reviews and publications as one of the best in each museums in New York City, one of the seven hidden gem museums of New York City, one of the 10 best museums in New York City you've never heard of. We aim to change that, and this one's my favorite, one of the most quirky offbeat museums in the United States. Driven by Glenn's vision and Cindy's incredible energy and creativity and enthusiasm, and a team of really amazing and dedicated and talented staff, we've had a success for one of these first five years. But here comes the pitch, folks, our work is not done. We need your support to keep going, to expand our horizons, to reach more people, particularly women and minorities, and to turn the tides on the negative themes in our society. And so I welcome all of you here tonight, and I hope you have a great time. But I also want to personally ask every person in this room to dig deep and contribute to our cause. Something, anything that you can afford, please. It's an investment in our youth, it's an investment in our society, it's an investment in our country's future. Thank you and have a good night. Thank you.