Meredith Welfare ’28 had to take every math class twice in high school because of a learning disability.
“It just never clicked for me,” says Welfare, a religion and Spanish double major from Fort Mill, South Carolina.
She expected more of the same when she registered for Math 120 at Wofford.
Designed to satisfy the college’s mathematics general education requirement, the course, Appreciation of Mathematics, is geared toward students whose majors don’t require a more traditional class like calculus or statistics.
Like Welfare, many of the students in the class are math-averse or have math anxiety.
“What I find with this group of students in particular is often they’ve had bad experiences in math classes,” says Dr. Matt Cathey, professor of mathematics. “In this class, I come in and say, ‘I’m not going to put you through what you’ve gone through before.’”
Instead, Cathey goes in the first day with no syllabus. He gives the students a list of topics and lets them vote on what they’re most interested in learning. Topics range from games and puzzles to music, dance and the visual arts. All are fields shaped by mathematics. For example, in Cathey’s class, harmony in music is about the numerical relationships between notes. Art is the study of geometry, symmetry and form.
“I want to give these students a chance to see there’s a place for mathematics in their lives beyond just balancing their checkbook,” says Cathey, who won the 2025 Roger Milliken Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Science. “If they walk away from this class with some sense of how I see mathematics — something that I love, that I’m passionate about, that I find beauty in — I consider that a victory.”
Welfare is one of his success stories.
In Math 120, she learned how to use group theory, or the study of symmetry, as a framework to solve a Rubik’s cube. She taught herself card tricks that rely on mathematical algorithms and read books about the divine proportion, a golden ratio approximately equal to 1.618 that appears repeatedly in nature and art as a perfect spiral. As part of her final class project, Welfare choreographed two dances that incorporated spiraling movements.
“This class changed my mind about math,” she says. “I’m still not going to be a math major, but my mind has been opened, and I see that math can be just as creative as art.”
Emma Estridge ’27, an English major from Kershaw, South Carolina, had a similar experience.
“I was not a STEM person at all. I didn’t care about math, because I didn’t see the value in it,” Estridge says. That was before taking Math 120 this past fall.
Besides cracking the Rubik’s cube, Estridge learned about the history of mathematics and studied famous mathematicians like Hypatia of Alexandria, a fourth century scholar who was one of the first women to study math, astronomy and philosophy, and Évariste Galois, a 20-year-old French revolutionary who spent the last night of his life feverishly writing down theories that would later influence the development of abstract algebra. (He was killed in a duel the next day.)
“That was probably my favorite thing because it was connected to storytelling, and I’m very language-based,” Estridge says. By the end of the semester, she had a new appreciation for math. “I was able to explore it in ways that related to subjects that I like.”
Experiences like Welfare’s and Estridge’s are a “monumental achievement,” says Dr. Joseph Spivey, professor and chair of mathematics.
“They both entered the class being completely closed to mathematics altogether and had their minds opened up to the wonders of the subject,” Spivey says. “This is just one small reminder that what we do here matters.”