Full Circle
by Emily Raij
When Margarita Azbel’s family, along with many other Soviet Jews, fled Belarus in the winter of 1980, she was just nine years old and lost half a year of school by the time the immigration process was complete.
“We left as refugees,” she says. “We had to give up our citizenship. We were stateless.”
Her family settled in a neighborhood in Queens, New York, and Margarita was put in an ESL (English as a Second Language) class at school, where she says she didn’t learn much. She began picking up more English during a summer camp, but it was in math where Margarita really thrived.
“I didn’t need to know English to do math,” she says.
Margarita eventually excelled at a math and science high school, studied economics in college, and earned her law degree.
She credits her success to her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Minsk ghetto with his brother and was part of the Partisans, the Jewish resistance group that fought against the Nazis. When Margarita would play with her friends at her grandfather’s house in Russia, they would solve little math puzzles together. Margarita didn’t know it at the time, but these playdates were her first experience with Math Circles, something she describes as “a community focused on the enjoyment of mathematical problem-solving.”
In America, Margarita discovered a country where education was a way up. Her own mother – a piano teacher who became a computer programmer after attending a programming boot camp in the U.S. – was living proof.
“That’s a gateway for immigrants to a better life,” Margarita says. “Jobs are getting more technical and require more and more STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math]. It’s really important for kids to develop thinking skills rather than just passing tests. That’s what Math Circles do. They develop thinking.”
She and her husband Alexander, a radiologist, moved to Winter Park with their two-year-old son Sam in 1998. Their younger son Ari was born in 1999. Both boys attended preschool at The Roth Family JCC and then Jewish Academy of Orlando before going to Lake Highland Preparatory School.
Completing the Circle
As a middle schooler, Ari showed a strong interest in math, so Margarita searched for a local Math Circle to sharpen his skills and connect him with other math-loving peers. She found none, so Margarita and Ari decided to start a Math Circle, themselves.
The mom of Ari’s friend knew just the place to begin: Orlando’s Meadowbrook Middle School, a Title I school that did not have a math enrichment program. In 2016, Ari and some friends began working with students there on Saturdays, and the Orlando Math Circle (OMC) was born.
“One of the aims of OMC is to get students who are historically underrepresented involved in enrichment mathematics to foster enthusiasm for learning math or to spark curiosity and motivation to play with mathematics,” says Margarita, who now serves as OMC’s director.
Today, OMC offers a full calendar of affordable or free math-enrichment programs throughout Central Florida for students of diverse backgrounds in grades three through 12, plus events for the whole family.
In February, OMC welcomed hundreds of participants and 60 volunteers to work on interactive, hands-on math problems, puzzles, and games at its Winter Park Family Mathematics Festival. The OMC booth was also at this year’s Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival and Maker Faire Orlando.
These events, and all of OMC’s programs, help kids learn to solve problems, make connections, and understand that wrong answers aren’t the end of the world.
“There’s a misconception that in order to be a Ph.D. in mathematics, you have to be a genius,” says Margarita. “But most are just people who spent time doing it. Everyone has a math brain from the time we’re born.”