The Envelopes of July 31st: Ten Years of a Math Camp, and the Guyana It Is Quietly Building

Aug 02, 2026 News

---

By Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman

Co-Founder, the Blackman-Waddell Summer Math Institute; Professor & Chair of Mathematics, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York

(Kaieteur News) – On Monday morning, a girl from Bartica sealed a guess inside an envelope. She had been shown a question no one had taught her to answer, how many of the numbers from 1 to 2,026 share no common factor with 2,026? and asked to commit, in writing, before any instruction, to what she believed. On Friday morning, at the Centre for Local Business Development on South Road, that envelope was opened. The girl who opened it was not quite the girl who sealed it. In between lay five days — and, in a sense, ten years.

This past Friday, July 31^st, the summer mathematics programme founded in Georgetown in 2016 as the Queen’s College Summer Mathematics Institute closed its tenth-anniversary edition and opened its second decade under a new name: the Blackman-Waddell Summer Math Institute, under the auspices of STEM Guyana. Seventeen certificates were presented. The students who earned them came from sixteen schools, including Queen’s College and Saint Stanislaus, but also Bladen Hall Multilateral, North Georgetown Secondary, Mae’s, St. Joseph High, St. Rose’s High, Austin Castello Tutorial, and Chase’s Academic Foundation, from Georgetown to Berbice to Bartica. Some arrived with A’s in mathematics. Some came to strengthen a foundation. By Friday, those starting distinctions no longer defined the room and that was the point.

The programme rests on a conviction I have carried for a long time: mathematical talent exists in every community; opportunity does not. I learned it in Central Brooklyn, where the Frank Ragland Math Masters Institute at Medgar Evers College, a mathematics circle in the great Eastern European tradition, proved it year after year with children whose mathematical potential the system had too often underestimated. Eleven years ago, on July 31st, 2015, we held that institute’s closing ceremony in New York. One year later, on July 31st, 2016, we closed our first camp on home soil in Georgetown. This past Friday, the date kept faith with us a third time. Some dates, it turns out, are loyal.

What do the students actually do for a week? Serious mathematics, taught as discovery rather than drill. This year’s curriculum, “Five Days, Five Ideas,” carried them from prime numbers to cryptography to mathematical modelling, proof, and statistical literacy. They computed, by hand, the remainder when 7 raised to the power 2,026, a number with 1,713 digits, too large ever to write down, is divided by 11. They discovered for themselves the modular arithmetic that underpins modern public-key cryptography. They worked with a simplified scenario based on Guyana’s oil-revenue growth, built three different futures from the same two facts, and learned the questions every citizen should ask of every projection and every percentage: what does it assume, and what evidence supports that assumption? And they learned to be wrong out loud. In our rooms, being wrong out loud on the way to being right is not a failure. It is the method. Every mathematician who ever lived got there that way.

This is not remediation, and it is not exam preparation. It is a wager on our children’s minds and it costs their families nothing.

The anniversary week was itself a lesson in what this country can do when it decides to. When we needed rooms, Guyana’s institutions opened them: the World Trade Centre Georgetown and the Centre for Local Business Development hosted our students in the very spaces where the nation’s commercial future is negotiated, fitting classrooms, we told the children, for who they are becoming. Guest speakers gave their mornings and afternoons. A programme alumna, now a young professional in the energy sector, returned to address the cohort she once sat in. Another alumnus studies engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York; his younger brother sat in this year’s room. And in one of the week’s most stirring hours, STEM Guyana’s national robotics team, now preparing for international competition, demonstrated their machines for the students. Three members of that team are former math campers. In 2016, STEM Guyana brought robotics to our children; in 2026, our children are the robotics team. That is what a decade looks like: the circle closing and widening at once.

Dr. Cleveland Waddell, my co-founder, was once my student at Queen’s College. He is today an applied mathematician and Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in the United States and every July he comes home to hold the door open behind him. The Institute now carries both our names not as a monument but as a promise about generations: one lifts the next, and the next lifts the one after. With Dr. Karen Abrams and STEM Guyana now carrying this work forward with us, the same STEM Guyana that first brought robotics to our campers in 2016, that promise has an institutional home.

Why does a mathematics programme matter to Guyana, now, in this consequential season of our national life? Because sovereignty is not only a flag and a constitution. Sovereignty, practically understood, is the capacity of a people to read, verify, and contest the numbers that govern their national life, the contracts, the models, the budgets, the percentages in the headlines. A nation that must permanently import that capacity is not fully sovereign; it is a spectator to its own arithmetic. Some of the people who will audit Guyana’s contracts in 2035 are approximately fourteen years old today. A few of them, I am glad to report, spent last week sealing and opening envelopes on South Road.

So here is what comes next, said plainly: not only will we keep this going, we will expand the offerings. We intend more students, more schools, and, as partners join us, more regions and more weeks. To the corporate community that stepped forward this year, to our alumni across Guyana and the diaspora, to teachers with a summer to give and parents with a child who lights up at a puzzle: the second decade has room for you, and we are easy to find.

On Friday, before the certificates, each student completed one sentence on a card: “The question I will now ask of every number is…” Their answers belong to them. But I will tell you this: a country whose fourteen-year-olds are asking those questions is a country whose future is in better hands than its headlines sometimes suggest. In a season when this nation has known real sorrow, seventeen young Guyanese spent a week proving what is still possible here.

The envelopes are open. The second decade has begun. And July 31st, we trust, will keep faith with us again.

Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and co-founder, with Dr. Cleveland Waddell, of the Blackman-Waddell Summer Math Institute, presented under the auspices of STEM Guyana. Contact: tblackman@mec.cuny.edu.

---

• Local Business Development, Math camp, Terrence Richard Blackman

---