“The Secrets of a Happy Immigrant”

Dr. Bogdan Suceavă is a professor of Mathematics at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). He also directs and hosts the Fullerton Math Circle, an outreach program of CSUF Department of Mathematics for curious young math enthusiasts. I have participated in the Math Circle for almost four years, and have had the pleasure of tackling challenging problems under his guidance. The “Gazeta” he mentions throughout the interview is Gazeta Matematică, a renowned Romanian math journal that has been published continuously since 1895. Most of the problems we work on come from it, translated by him.

Professor Suceavă grew up in Romania, where he developed a passion for math in middle school. He came to the United States and earned a PhD degree in mathematics from Michigan State University. As he joked, a happy immigrant is somebody who has a good math problem to think about.

Professor Suceavă is remarkably prolific: he has published more than 90 papers. He is also a writer well known in Romania, with 20 volumes to his name, including seven novels, two short story collections, and books of essays and poetry. Two of his novels, Coming from an Off-Key Time (Northwestern University Press) and Miruna, a Tale (Twisted Spoon Press), have been translated into English and are available on Amazon.

His writing talent was on display throughout our interview. Speaking about his cat, he observed that “what I like most about cats is the way they reorganize space and the way they think [about] time, the way they reshape your life in a very dominating way.”