ROMÂNĂ 
ENGLISH VERSION 
The Professor of March
Associate Professor Cătălin Angelo Ioan, PhD
Associate Professor Cătălin Angelo Ioan, PhD graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics within the University of Bucharest in 1985 and became a Doctor in mathematics at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași in 2000, with the thesis "Contributions to the geometry of semi-Riemannian foliations", coordinated by Professor Aurel Bejancu, PhD.
From graduation until now he has taught 20-30 branches of mathematics or related ones (algebra, real mathematical analysis, complex analysis, linear algebra, numerical analysis, analytical and differential geometry, differential and partial differential equations, variational calculus, linear programming, graph theory, mathematical probabilities and statistics, mathematical modeling, game theory, expectation theory, financial mathematics, actuarial mathematics, stock theory, microeconomics in n-dimensional spaces, urbanism and landscaping, computer science, etc.) at almost all levels, starting from the 5th grade, continuing with high school, and since 1990 at university level: bachelor's and master's studies.
He has never considered teaching as a profession but simply as a passion.
A little secret of his activity is that he permanently considers that he is playing. A game that can be a little serious, from the challenge of the first course, when he sets personal records of capturing attention (at this discipline hated by so many people), to the articles in which he sometimes plays with formulas, trying to make light firstly for himself and then, perhaps, for others and ending with the attitude towards life.
"A continuous play puts an end to monotony, so that a course taught for the 30th or 40th time may become as exciting as in the initial moments", Professor Ioan confesses.
During his career, he has written 37 distinct books (99 in total with the revised editions and sometimes hundreds of pages added), 205 scientific papers published in Japan, the United Kingdom, Latvia, Turkey and, of course, Romania, being citing in 84 international articles. Starting with December 2021, he reached the 22nd place in the world (out of the 63969 economists present) in the Repec ranking in the category Top 5% Authors, Number of Journal Pages, Weighted by Number of Authors (with a total of 2217.5 pages/ author ).
Starting with January 2014, a huge amount of math didactic work began on YouTube, reaching a total of 3126 today. The number of permanent subscribers is 6944 (in addition to tens of thousands of others), and the number of views reached 1,740,419 from more than 11 million posts. The satisfaction of these movies is enormous, with favorable comments and dozens of requests for solving problems or various situations, creating a constant pressure to continue this approach.
In parallel with this, for about 10 years and under the auspices of Danubius University, he has been holding a series of preparatory sessions for the Baccalaureate exam for the use of 12th grade students, especially as, in these turbulent times, they are also free. All these lessons as well as the current courses of the university teaching activity are posted on YouTube, so that the preparation for the Baccalaureate exam has exceeded the borders of Galați municipality.
Some time ago, in the year 2007, he played like literature (not very successfully, according to the author). But he wrote three prose books and a poetry one. And he tried various experiments. For example, a short story - "Four Widows in Klein's Group" - concretizes the behavior of the group of symmetries with respect to the axes in the plan and its origin in a series of events involving four rather grumpy ladies. The poetry volume brings new levels of play, some of them comprising poems in poems in the last words of the verses. As an example, the poem "E" (but not only it):
"Elegies lost
Epics rewritten
Episodic verses
Edifices outlawed.
Effigies too full
Evocations for show
’ermetic writings
Entropy in bravado.
Ecumenical gestures
Epistles returned
Eden lost
Emblematic tricks.
Embolism of world
Equilibria full
’eresies reborn
Ephemeral destinies.”
read on the last words, it becomes: Lost, rewritten, outlawed verses/ Too full, for show, writings in bravado/ Returned gestures lost in tricks/ Of the entire world, reborn destinies.
When asked what other profession he would have liked to have, Professor Cătălin Ioan said that: “In principle, no other profession than the one that I have. But, if fate had pushed me in another direction, I would have probably tried to honor my profession (probably - because a number of professions would have seemed impossible to me in terms of skills). The idea is that everyone should be aware of what he/ she can do and his/ her real skills. People who are good at everything (and not even then) have no longer existed since the Middle Ages and, if they insist, they end up badly.”
Although mathematics is the discipline that bothers students even from elementary school, regarding the question ”what is mathematics good for?”, Professor Cătălin Angelo Ioan’s answer was short: “Look around you and tell me what you see! Could a phone, a computer, this building, the car you get in when you leave, your watch and practically everything around you (except the lovage in the soup) have existed without mathematics (with its applications in physics)?”
Associate Professor Cătălin Angelo Ioan, PhD also said something about his future projects: “Well, I haven't reached the halfway point! In principle, I want to write several dozens of more serious articles, to write one of the books that I have started and restarted many times, a book of differential geometry on differentiable varieties that can reach appreciable dimensions, to reach about 10,000 math videos for students and many, many more. On the other hand, I don't have sure projects because, if I have an idea, something like a play, I can work on it for months, giving up everything I am working on at that moment."
