Math is all about abstraction. The application of concepts and symbols to explore observable patterns. But how one teaches math is hardly abstract, nor is it value neutral. Lily Khadjavi believes math education, at its best, sheds light on real-world problems, and that instructors can and should promote social justice in designing curricula.

According to respected Pitzer College math historian Judith Grabiner, the problems solved by a given culture speak volumes about what that culture deems important.

So, what does it say about American culture when our calculus textbooks ask students to model the trajectory of golf balls or measure revenues and cost functions to maximize profit? Why not ask them to calculate the environmental impact of recycling or gauge the incidence of racial profiling in police traffic stops?

Khadjavi, a professor of mathematics in the LMU Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering, is a leader in the national movement to include social justice materials in math pedagogy.

Published in 2022, the two-volume set invites student number-crunchers to engage with real-world data on poverty, human trafficking, environmental racism, income inequality, voter access, gentrification, and gerrymandering, to name a few hot-button topics.

“These aren’t toy problems we cooked up to demonstrate a math tool,” she says. “They’re real applications where students can model real-world phenomena around issues we hope they’ll find compelling.”

Khadjavi’s own niche happens to be using math to better understand race-based policing.

The child of academics, she grew up in sleepy Fairfield, Connecticut, where her Iranian-born father taught physics at Fairfield University, a Jesuit Institution, and her Norwegian-born mom taught French. Her dad died when Khadjavi was still in her teens, but he remains her role model. A vocal critic of both Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s repressive regime and the Islamist theocracy that replaced it, Abbas Khadjavi went on to march for civil rights in Washington, D.C. As a naturalized citizen, he vociferously exercised his free-speech rights.

“My dad really embraced being critical in the positive sense,” Khadjavi says. “He believed if you saw something that you thought should be changed, you should try to do something about it.”

Taking up her father’s mantle, Khadjavi got involved in the labor movement as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, organizing to improve work conditions for teaching assistants. She rose to chair the collective bargaining committee and be president of the local.

As a scholar, however, Khadjavi was apolitical. She’d majored in math at Harvard, and upon earning her Ph.D. at Berkeley, joined LMU’s faculty in 1999.

“My math life and my activist life weren’t intertwined,” she says. “And then I landed on an unexpected journey.”

About 20 years ago, Khadjavi was on the lookout for interesting real-world data. It was her first time teaching undergraduate statistics, and she chanced upon a treasure trove of number tables documenting Los Angeles Police Department traffic stops.

“Back then, officers were required by the U.S. Department of Justice, under consent decree, to record information about every traffic and pedestrian stop — that’s hundreds of thousands of stops every year,” she says. “And I didn’t see anyone else analyzing it.”

Khadjavi put the police data in her students’ hands and challenged them to apply the principles of hypothesis testing.

Their findings were shocking. It turned out 20 percent of police stops involving Black men resulted in a vehicle search — more than triple the national average.

“We got to a moment in the computation when the students audibly gasped,” Khadjavi recalls.

Working with colleagues from Cal Poly Pomona, Khadjavi organized a summer undergraduate research program around the rich LAPD data set. The following year, she divided her statistics class into small work groups. As she circulated around the room, one team actively shooed Khadjavi away. Their numbers were so off-the-charts that they were scrambling to find computational errors, and they didn’t want any help from the teacher. 

“That was a very good moment,” Khadjavi recalls. “It was beautiful. They were really engaged.”

Her 2006 article, “Driving While Black in the City of Angels,” which appeared in Chance, the journal of the American Statistical Association, established Khadjavi as an authority in the use of data to study racial profiling and police practice.

To better understand the issues around policing, she decided to “lawyer-up” her knowledge base, reading professional journals and attending law conferences. Soon she was presenting at those conferences. In 2020, she was appointed to California’s Racial Identity and Profiling Advisory Board, which makes policy recommendations to state and local agencies.

“That’s made my math life much more interesting,” says Khadjavi, who is also active in promoting participation in math for women, minorities, and people in the LGBTQ+ community.

Moving beyond the LAPD data set, Khadjavi designed classroom activities around public dashboards tabulating traffic stops and vehicle searches statewide, then in Connecticut and New Jersey.

Next, she broadened her scope to environmental justice.

In a 2018 article for the math journal PRIMUS, she and co-author Gizem Karaali, a math professor at Pomona College, presented calculus projects around two infamous man-made disasters: the Iraqi mercury contamination of 1971, which poisoned much of the nation’s grain supply and resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations, and the 2015 Porter Ranch gas leak, the largest in U.S. history, which released more than 100,000 metric tons of methane and hazardous chemicals, forcing evacuations and causing lastingenvironmental harm.

Warming to their project, Khadjavi and Karaali sent out a call to the math community for more classroom-tested, ready-to-use, social justice-themed lesson plans. They were inundated with material, which they consolidated into the two-volume “Mathematics for Social Justice.”

The first volume’s problem sets can be applied to teach everything from precalculus to differential equations, graph theory, and beyond. The second volume is geared more for general education courses such as quantitative reasoning and introduction to statistics.

Khadjavi hopes to trigger a ripple effect.

“My students are very important to me,” she says, “but in terms of impact, each semester I’m working with only about 30 students. I want to push the door wide open and give lots of mathematicians across the country a chance to use this data in their own classrooms.”

Khadjavi co-authored a chapter on racial profiling in Connecticut with instructions for students to download and analyze the police data for themselves.

Chapters by other authors tackle timely issues such as the effects of raising the minimum wage, mandatory drug testing for public assistance and partisan gerrymandering. One module, developed by Victor Piercey for his quantitative literacy general education course at Ferris State University in Michigan, revolves around author Michelle Alexander’s 2010 best seller, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Piercey starts the class with a tour of the Jim Crow Museum, housed on the Ferris State campus. He then has students work through Alexander’s book chapter by chapter, applying the mathematical tools they’re learning to test arguments presented in the book.

Khadjavi points to another innovative course, taught by Maria Mercedes Franco at Queensborough Community College in New York, structured around the UN Declaration of Human Rights. After familiarizing themselves with the UN document, Franco’s students design their own research questions and run quantitative analyses of real-world human rights abuses.

Khadjavi ended a three-year term as math department chair in 2024. She continues to hunt for creative ways to advance LMU’s mission — especially the part about educating the whole person and promoting justice. She’s currently working on an initiative with Seaver College faculty to integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals into all science and math classes. Last year, she and several colleagues introduced a 1-unit enrichment workshop for math majors. Led by Khadjavi, the group meets weekly to hear from outside speakers and engage in justice-themed projects and discussions. Among other things, the 2024 junior cohort generated sophisticated digital renderings from original early 20th-century charts created by pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. The 2025 senior cohort is holding book club-style discussions around Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction”and Francis Su’s “Mathematics for Human Flourishing,” past winners of the Euler Book Prize.

While Khadjavi can’t quantify the direct impact of her pedagogical innovations, the movement is clearly building. New subfields with names like “quantitative justice” and “humanistic mathematics” have emerged, with observable representation at math conferences. A scholarly journal is in development.

In July, Khadjavi co-led a four-day workshop at Caltech sponsored by the American Institute of Mathematics on how to develop “impactful” math curricula.

Last year, her work was spotlighted in Nature magazine and Scientific American. The year before, the Association for Women in Mathematics honored Khadjavi with its inaugural Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice, named for two revered human rights and math equity champions.

To be clear, Khadjavi doesn’t believe social justice-themed problems should replace traditional textbook problems.

“There are some really rich collections of data coming from sports, medicine, and public health,” she says, noting that many of her students are biology or health and human science majors.

But whenever possible, she says, “I try to illustrate mathematical ideas using scenarios that give students a way to think about the profound issues of our time.” Her two statistics classes are currently working with jury-selection data and air-quality data.

For Khadjavi, disseminating social justice-themed lesson plans is part of a larger mission. She hopes to embed active, ongoing conversations around justice in the college math community.

In 2022, she co-authored “Mathematics With, About and For Social Justice,” published by Carnegie Math Pathways/WestEd. The 12-page guide is a progressive math manifesto, exposing the high aspirations hidden in three humble prepositions.

“We teach with social justice when we make classroom norms explicit, interrupting historical patterns of who speaks in class,” the pamphlet states. “About means a lesson is planned and purposeful in looking at serious or provocative issues using mathematics. Foris anchored by the idea that mathematical activity can be part of actions that transform social, political and economic conditions to reduce injustice.”

While Khadjavi sees herself as an activist, her goal as a teacher remains apolitical.

Quoting quantitative literacy pioneer Lynn Steen, whose 2001 classic “Mathematics and Democracy” she keeps close at hand, Khadjavi intones with conviction: “We want to empower people by giving them the tools to think for themselves, to ask intelligent questions of experts and to confront authority confidently.”

“That’s the rallying cry for me,” Khadjavi says. “I want my students to have the tools in hand. I don’t expect them to share my politics. They’re independent beings with their own political outlooks, but they should be empowered to use those tools.”

Diane Krieger, a frequent contributor to LMU Magazine, is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications at Tufts University, Johns Hopkins University, Caltech and The Idaho Statesman, where she was the resident philharmonic and theater critic. Her article titled “China’s Migrant Mothers” appeared at the LMU Magazine website in October 2024.