Matthew Yip wants to rewrite the rules of math education, starting with who gets to win

The kid who didn't have his own bedroom in Hong Kong now has his face on a Nasdaq billboard in Times Square. His father drove a bus. His mother stayed home. Matthew Yip was good at one thing in school, and he has spent the rest of his life trying to make sure other kids get a fair shot at being good at it too.

He holds two PhDs, one in Mathematics and one in Education. He runs the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the International (Macau) Institute of Academic Research, and directs the Mathematics and Statistics Program at the Chartered Institute of Training and Development. Most people in the math community know him as Prof. Mathewmatician.

The economics class that changed everything

In secondary school, Matthew Yip had to choose between economics and additional mathematics. He picked economics because it sounded more useful. His compulsory math grade came back the highest in his year. Economics was average.

He took the hint. Over the next year he taught himself additional mathematics from textbooks, then read mathematics at university. Money was tight at home, so he tutored private students on the side to pay his way through. Two things stuck with him from that period. He could learn math better from notes and reference books than from lectures, which made him wonder whether the subject was simply being taught wrong. And he kept watching classmates fall behind on material their teachers had already left in the rearview, which made him sure of it.

"I just love math," he says. "I enjoy the process of solving different math problems, and teaching my classmates to solve difficult problems." His father picked his English name. Matthew took that as a sign about what he was supposed to do with his life. Not be a great mathematician. Be the person who fixed how mathematics gets taught.

A system built around the student, not the schedule

The Mathewmatician's Dictionary is Matthew Yip's main product, an automated learning system that combines textbooks, exercises, lectures and assessments into one place. A student can't progress to the next topic until they've solved every problem in the current one on their own. The pace belongs to the learner, not the calendar.

That design works against how most schools run. In a normal classroom the curriculum moves at a set speed whether anyone is keeping up or not, which loses kids at both ends. Matthew Yip's view is that the rigidity is the problem, and the technology to soften it has been available for a while.

The second project is the Global Mathematics and Mathematics Olympiad Graded Assessment Test with Competition, which he founded and currently runs. His complaint with the existing Olympiad model is simple. It favours families who can pay for expensive coaching. His version is open to all ages, includes a free preparatory course, and grades students against the material they've actually been taught in school. "Applicants can get a free preparatory course, which is sufficient and fair learning support, to reduce the inequality brought by different family backgrounds," he says.

The trophy case, and why he built it

The award list is long, and Matthew Yip is straightforward about why that matters. He needed a platform before anyone in the math education industry would take his ideas seriously, so he set out to build one.

He has received the Lifetime Achievement Award and the World Leaders Award at the UK Parliament. The International Association of Top Professionals named him Top Mathematics Educator and put his photograph on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square. India's Times Group listed him among its Times Power Icons in math education. Passion Vista, CIO Today, CIO Times and Magnate View have all run him on their covers. More than 200 outlets have interviewed him. He has spoken at TEDx, at Oxford, at the Education 2.0 Conference, at the Asian African Economic Forum. He holds 19 personal world records in math and math education, and his students have collected more than 75 top tier honours of their own.

He has also coached the Hong Kong team at the International Hope Cup Mathematics Invitational, served as a senior trainer for the China and World International Mathematics Olympiad Committees, and trained with the World Association of Abacus and Mental Arithmetic, where he came up with a way to calculate nth roots on an abacus.

What he's building next

Matthew Yip thinks the next version of math education is automated and individualised. He also thinks the degree system will eventually give way to something stranger, a model where employers hire on subject specific public assessment scores instead of the usual bachelor's, master's and doctorate ladder. AI, in his view, will take over enough of the routine teaching that the strongest math minds can stop marking homework and go do research. He is already working on how to integrate AI into the Mathewmatician's Dictionary in ways that genuinely help students understand, rather than just give the product a feature to advertise.

His own life stays deliberately small. "Since my goal is to be a great person, but not a rich person, I expect my life will not change a lot in the near future," he says. "On the other hand, I strongly believe I could make great progress in 3 to 5 years."

Time, in his view, has always been worth more than money. He has put his into one thing for a long time now, and he isn't planning to stop.