On the evening of Thursday, February 5, Math Club hosted the first Pi Talk of the year, featuring statistician Al Ozonoff, who delivered a speech titled “How I Learned to Love Counting Without Counting,” which spotlighted mathematical career paths. Ozonoff ’s talk drew around 100 students to gather in the Farokhzad Math Center (FMC) and learn about math while enjoying dessert.

Ozonoff holds a number of titles as a professor, researcher, scientist and statistician at Boston University School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Sabeti Lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Math Club Head Celina Wang ‘27 said, “We were able to get into contact with him because, actually, [computational biologist Pardis Sabeti] came and spoke to a class a few years back, and [Ozonoff] works in that same lab.”

Founded by Academic Dean and former Math Department Chair Heather Sugrue in 2013, Pi Talks bring speakers to discuss mathematics and its role in their lives. Math Teacher and Math Club Faculty Advisor Philip Robson recalls that, although the series paused following the pandemic, he “took it upon [himself]...to try and restart it” after the FMC was built in 2024. For Wang, Pi Talks serve as an outlet to showcase “how math is being used in our community.”

Still, the focus and format of the events have varied. Last year, for example, Carnegie Mellon professor and former national coach of the USA International Mathematical Olympiad team Po-Shen Loh discussed the future of artificial intelligence and emphasized “charity and values,” according to Math Club Co-Head Eli Berk ‘26. Berk himself later gave a talk on approximating Pi as an extension of a math project for his calculus class.

This year, for the third Pi Talk since the series’s reinstatement, Ozonoff explained his journey. After getting his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees in pure mathematics, he turned to the field of biostatistics, where he now works with a focus on developing and applying methods of infectious disease surveillance. Alongside Sabeti in the Sentinel program, Ozonoff expanded his work, which centers around strengthening infectious disease surveillance at the frontlines of emerging infectious diseases in West Africa. He then explained a statistical method known as capture-recapture, which is used to estimate quantities that cannot be directly measured—particularly populations that are mobile, misclassified, hidden, or only partially observed. According to Ozonoff, the method has applications beyond public health, including in national censuses.

Some student responses to the talk reflected differing expectations for the Pi Talk. Math Club attendee Vicky Ji ‘29 said that speakers should “focus less on personal stories and more on the math,” citing her low interest level for the event as a whole.

Berk acknowledged, “we’re trying to find that balance between… people who want to teach math and people who want to talk about how they use math.”

Other students, however, found issues in Ozonoff ’s broader framing. Adam Amin ‘27 critiqued, “I thought [Ozonoff] talked about too many details,” though he still found that “the premise was fascinating.” Amin’s main takeaway emphasized the mathematical core of the presentation: “while statistics and data are very important tools, they often don’t tell the full story because of the difficult nature of data collection.”

Wang, on the other hand, drew inspiration from Ozonoff ’s career path. Berk added, “the kind of thinking it takes to tackle a tough problem in math class really does have applications.” He further noted, “I think [these events are] really good for one's education as a whole,” encouraging students of all math levels to “come try [Math Club] out.”

Robson, too, “[wants] Math Club to be inclusive,” but acknowledges that “there's a lot of…competing pieces” and a “stigma around math” at Milton that stymies participation in events such as the Pi Talk. Despite such hurdles, he hopes that Ozonoff ’s perspective and path from studying pure mathematics to working in applied fields helped expand students’ understanding of the “different doors that are open for people who study math,” as well as the idea that math is “not just a very…narrow world.”