"Table Talk with Mathematics Instructor (and Olympic Coach) Zuming Feng" from The Exeter Bulletin, Fall 2007

Zuming Feng

If you were to dissect Zuming Feng’s life as he would ask his students to dissect a challenging mathematical problem, you might find, as even his best students sometimes do, that initial assumptions can be misleading.

One might assume, for example, that Feng—who has been teaching math at Exeter since 1995 and who is considered one of the foremost secondary school math instructors in the country—must have been something of a savant from early on.Yet while he does admit to an adolescent interest in and aptitude for math, he explains, with characteristic succinctness, that as a student at Nankai High School (a boarding school in the Chinese city of Tianjin) in the early 1980s, he “had no clue what higher math was about.”

“I was just following the flow of the Chinese system,” says Feng, who went on to enter China’s prestigious Beijing University at age 15. “You don’t get too much choice in China. Basically, this was one of the subjects I did pretty well at, so I kept taking courses in it and suddenly, I realized I was a math major.”

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