Courtesy Shalinee Sharma

Courtesy Shalinee Sharma

As a sixth grader in Buffalo, New York, Shalinee Sharma (MBA 2005) believed math just wasn’t her thing. There were only a few girls in the honors class at her new school, and Sharma soon realized that she was far behind her peers. The best she could hope for was to survive the year. “I’m not a math kid,” she told herself at the time. “And that’s fine.”

But then a surprisingly good grade on a test prompted a word of encouragement from her teacher. “He quietly said to me, ‘You did much better on this test, and if you do your very best, you could be just as good as the boys,’” Sharma remembers.

Inelegant phrasing aside, the teacher’s remark inspired Sharma to try harder. She asked for help, did extra work, and eventually caught up. By her senior year of high school, she was excelling in calculus—and enjoying it. “Math has a quality of beauty, or perfection, that just creates a sense of wonder and awe,” she says. “Not all the time, but once in a while, I could feel that. I could touch it.”

Today, Sharma recognizes how a self-fulfilling prophecy held back many children from reaching their potential—and from realizing the beauty in numbers. In truth, she argues, there’s no such thing as a “math kid,” and everyone is capable of numeracy, with the right support. That’s the message of her first book, Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, published in August 2024 by Penguin Random House. It’s also the mission of the nonprofit educational organization Zearn, which Sharma cofounded in 2012 and has served as CEO since 2016.

Improving math education is a daunting enterprise, especially in the United States. According to the most recent results of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, the US ranks 26th in math achievement worldwide. The country’s performance at the elementary, middle, and high school levels cratered during the recent pandemic, and it has yet to recover. The grim statistics have experts worried about the competitiveness of our tech sector, the long-term growth of our economy, and even the state of national security.

But to Sharma, America’s struggles with math also represent opportunity. “Imagine if every single kid caught up in math,” she says. “The return on investment is infinity.”

For more than a decade as a consultant at Bain & Company in the early 2000s, as well as during her time at HBS, Sharma enjoyed putting math to work, studying scale and impact and conducting data analytics on top companies. She also did pro bono work for New York City schools, where she came to know teachers who were passionate about math education—and who were certain that every child could succeed, regardless of their background.

“They were proving what’s possible,” Sharma says. “And they approached me with this really interesting question, which became the question I'm still obsessed with: What if we put the best learning content up online for everyone, for free? Could we bring forth the first truly numerate generation?”

That question led to the creation of Zearn’s digital platform for learning math, which Sharma says is not only backed by research but also inspired by examples of high-quality instruction at notable “bright spots” in the US and countries that outrank us in math achievement.

“There are four big things we’ve learned from studying bright spots,” Sharma says. “The first is belief. The expectations for what kids can do in mathematics in a country like Japan or Taiwan or Singapore are completely different, and that really matters.”

The second, she says, “is understanding, not just memorizing.” True understanding, she elaborates, can best be accomplished through visualization; imagine cookies on plates to understand multiplication, or meters below sea level to understand negative numbers. The third is adaptability: getting stuck is not a sign that you’re bad at math but that you may need to simply try another strategy. “And then, finally, practice!” she says. “And we have to make that practice fun.”

Informed by these principles, Zearn’s digital platform is now used by a quarter of US elementary school students and 1 million middle schoolers across the country. The impact is notable: Statewide analyses show students who use Zearn show double-digit gains on standardized exams.

But while test scores and market share are great, Sharma also has loftier goals in mind. She hopes that children can learn to see the beauty in math. We teach them to read, she notes, in the hope that they will one day appreciate the great books and classic novels that we ourselves have loved. What if we had that same feeling of eager expectation about geometry or algebra? “What if everyone could feel awe in math,” she asks, “the sense that you’re touching something of beauty?”

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