Dr. Edward Doolittle, Kanyen'kehake (Mohawk) nation and associate professor of mathematics at First Nations University of Canada, is the first Indigenous mathematics PhD in Canada.
This year's Hagey Lecturer has worked for decades to advance educational opportunities for Indigenous people and rethink what mathematics - and math education - look like for everyone.
But before any of that, he was a kid with a library card.
"I fell in love with mathematics at Terryberry Library," says Doolittle, who grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. Every week, his parents took him to the public library where he found himself gravitating towards books about math and problem-solving, particularly by Martin Gardner.
In ninth grade, Doolittle started competing in math contests, and through them he met Dr. James Stewart, a professor at McMaster University and author of calculus textbooks. Stewart got him access to the McMaster University library, where his self-taught journey continued.
He wasn't very interested in the algebra taught in his high school classes, but he excelled in math contests, including the University of Waterloo's competitions and eventually the Putnam contest. At the University of Toronto, Doolittle initially set out to study artificial intelligence. "My major interest was in machine translation because I was also very interested in languages," he shares. In the 1980s, however, artificial intelligence research was mainly philosophical, and he soon grew frustrated by the lack of practical applications.
Doolittle switched his major to mathematics, and excelled, going on to complete a master's and PhD in mathematics at the University of Toronto. After he graduated in 1997, however, he spent four years "wandering in the wilderness."
Wandering in the wilderness
"Like many Indigenous people, when I was in university I began to feel that I needed to serve my community, and Indigenous people in general," he says. "I started doing that work at the age of 19, exploring Indigenous knowledge, culture, spirituality and listening to elders, but after I graduated, I could do more."
He got a job at Queens University in their Aboriginal Teacher Education Program (now the Indigenous Teacher Education Program), where he began to do research into pedagogy for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. He then took a year's sabbatical to do Mohawk language immersion.
"Because of their traumatic time in the residential school system, my grandparents didn't pass the language down to my father," Doolittle says. "My father could only count to three in Mohawk, so I had to learn the language on my own."
In 2001, Doolittle received a call from First Nations University in Saskatchewan inviting him to apply for a job. "I was very pleased to learn about the opportunity because it would allow me to do the things I cared about the most."
Doolittle has been researching Indigenous mathematics for his entire career. "It's a difficult topic, and I haven't finished yet. It's easy to give easy answers that are wrong." For the last 12 years, that project has manifested as the "mathematics bundle." Bundles, he explains, are containers for objects that aid in the spiritual endeavour of understanding the world and are associated with specific nations or tasks.
In 2013, a group of Indigenous mathematicians and elders formally entrusted Doolittle with the bundle and met again in a workshop in the summer of 2025 at the Banff International Research Station to go deeper on the question of Indigenous mathematics.
Indigenous and Indigenizing
When asked to explain the distinction between Indigenous and Indigenizing mathematics, Doolittle uses the image of the 400-year-old Two-Row Wampum, which conceptualizes Indigenous people and settlers as living parallel lives in harmony.
We can imagine one of these rows as containing Indigenous mathematics - that is, the study of how Indigenous people have historically developed alternative mathematical systems.
The other row is the Western understanding of mathematics commonly taught around the world today and used in multiple fields. This kind of math, Doolittle says, "will never be fully Indigenized," but it can still take lessons and principles from Indigenous knowledge keepers so as to create spaces for research and education that prioritize peace, respect and collaboration.
He points to the example from Indigenous teaching of the Four Directions: mental, physical, emotional and spiritual. "Traditional math education emphasizes the mental but overlooks everything else," he explains. "Recently, however, research has demonstrated the effectiveness of incorporating physical exploration of math using physical manipulatives such as base ten blocks or algetiles into math education from kindergarten through university."
He also notes the importance of acknowledging the feelings of anxiety, dread and shame that so many people associate with math. He works to combat these feelings in his university classrooms by encouraging students to collaborate on problems and ask lots of questions. "Often, people will tell me that this university intro class is the first time in their lives that they enjoyed a math class," he says.
Finally, he and the other members of the Indigenous mathematics group explored the spiritual side of mathematics through ceremony and discussion. "Spirituality is different for different people," he says, "but community, ethics, transcendence, beauty - these are all part of the way that we think about math."
"Having two cultures, two ways of thinking, living in parallel with each other is a great gift … and there is so much we can learn from each other, if we create spaces of friendship and mutual respect."
