Celebrating Ma'am Mari-Jo Ruiz

The following is an edited transcript of a talk given last January 17, 2023 at the Math Majors Kumustahan of the ADMU Department of Mathematics. The theme of the event was celebrating excellence; majority of the math majors and many math department faculty members were in the audience.

I met Ma’am Mari-Jo Ruiz, or simply Ma’am, as many of us in the Math Department would fondly call her, when I was a junior back in 2008. I joined the department right after graduation and have since worked with Ma’am on many collaborations: taught courses, advised students, presented in, and even organized international conferences, published papers, and did graph theory research together. We had even traveled to Japan a few times. The last time we met was on December 8, 2022, making plans to team teach a class and planning to go back to Japan for the first time since the pandemic.

This is a celebration of the excellence of Mari-jo Ruiz, and I will begin with something she holds very dear to her heart.

An Excellent Mathematician

Ma’am was an excellent mathematician. She handled many of the OR courses in the ME program over several decades, making her in touch with the practicality of mathematics. Surely, that was one reason why she loved the subject. However, her love for math went beyond its utility. She appreciated math in and of itself. She was happy to do math for math’s sake, something I have witnessed working with her in the graph coloring research group. Her passion for math, even if not loud, was always on full display.

Ma’am also had a remarkable gift of intuition. At times, she would see the answer immediately. She was always fascinated with beautiful mathematics, which she said shouldn’t be too complicated. I will always remember being gifted a book that she co-authored “A Day’s Adventure in Math Wonderland.” As a dedication, she wrote “Mathematics is what we think, what we imagine, what we dream.”

An Excellent Leader, Servant

Ma’am joined the Ateneo in 1965, at 21, as a young faculty member. She had served the school in various capacities: as chair of both the Management Engineering (ME) and the Mathematics Departments at different periods in time, as Dean of the then School of Arts and Sciences from 1994 to 2000, and as a member of the Board of Trustees from 2005 to 2014.

Ma’am was instrumental in raising funds for scholarships, and for the construction of the SEC and SOM buildings. In November 2022, a FAME Scholarship Endowment was launched in honor of Ma’am Ruiz. Ma’am Ruiz has also been sponsoring the scholarship of a student every year, through the Office of Admission and Aid.

For all her achievements and contributions in and beyond Ateneo, Ma’am has been given the Lux-in-Domino Award in 2014. This is the highest recognition bestowed upon an Ateneo alumni who embody the ideals of the Ateneo through their work and service. In a talk last October 2019, Ma’am recalled “At 21, I had no real dreams for my life. God’s grace brought me to the Ateneo. Like the Jesuits, I am here to love and to serve”.

An Excellent Colleague, Friend, Family

More than just being an excellent colleague, Ma’am was also a dear friend and family to many. She was always diligent, responsible, and reliable. She was generous with her time,guiding,listening,and helping us with our different predicaments. She was generous, literally: there was always a pasalubong from her trips. More recently, she made her artworks into calendars and presented to us as Christmas gifts. She also made sure to celebrate her birthdays with us at the department, and she was also present for many personal occasions.

An Excellent Teacher

Ma’am was an excellent teacher, recognized as Outstanding Teacher by the Metrobank Foundation in 1992. Even though Ma’am taught difficult subjects, Ma’am was known for being extremely prepared with her lectures – delivered with clarity and with careful attention to her students. She would spend hours preparing for a one-hour class because she had to anticipate any questions students might ask. Her trademark approach was the use of the overhead projector and her acetates, most of which painstakingly prepared by hand. The pandemic did not deter her –Ma’am soldiered through, learnt and continued to teach online using a document projector connected to her Zoom screen.

I first met Ma’am as a teacher of our OR class back in 2008. At that time, a blockmate likened Ma’am to Meryl Streep; elegant but intimidating and strict. Despite this, she worked her magic on us, and we loved her and her class. She was straightforward, no-nonsense, but effortlessly connected with us. After that first semester of OR, we requested that she teach us OR2 the following semester. The following year, we continued to request for more electives from her. We realized that we really didn’t care what subject she taught as long as she was the one teaching it.

She continued caring for her students after they graduated, keeping in touch with them through social media or through emails, even greeting them during milestones of their lives.

Celebrating Ma’am Ruiz

Ma’am’s book, “A Day’s Adventure in Math Wonderland,”tells the story of fictional students who visit Math Wonderland, an exhibit of interactive math models in Japan founded by her colleague and friend, Prof. Akiyama. Here, the students witness the beauty, applicability, and inevitability of mathematics. When I was in college, there was a satellite exhibit of Wonderland at the Ateneo High School that I got to visit. When I was in Tokyo, I got to visit a similar exhibit of Prof. Akiyama in his university. I can confirm that the description was correct – one can really find genuine appreciation for math through the book and the exhibits.

But you see, for me, I had my own version of Math Wonderland even before the book and the exhibits. It was that small classroom on the first floor of SOM where we spent four semesters learning under Ma’am Ruiz. Despite my shortcomings as a student, somehow, she believed that I could do mathematics, enjoy it, and find fulfillment in it. She opened my eyes and heart to math, and that has led me on this path I’m currently on.

So thank you, Ma’am, for your life of service and love for all of us. I hope you continue to guide us, the Math Department, to strive to help our students find their own versions of wonderland, mathematics or otherwise.

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Text: Mark Anthony Tolentino