Jennifer Brooks

Jennifer Brooks’s path to faith was its own kind of discovery. With an early life full of academic conviction and spiritual drift from a Catholic background, Brooks was convinced that the intellectual life and religion were incompatible. Amid this belief, she attended sacrament meeting, an experience that brought her closer to the spirit than she had ever been before. She arrived at the Church not through argument but through experience. She listened to doctrine that answered questions she’d quietly carried for years and gained a newfound clarity of what seeing spiritually truly meant. She was baptized shortly after and has spoken about her conversion as the most significant turning point of her life. 

Brooks is a mathematician and teacher. She earned a BA summa cum laude from Ripon College and completed her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2005. She has been on the BYU mathematics faculty since 2019, where she researches several complex variables and harmonic analysis and has co-authored a textbook on mathematical proofs. Her love of math traces back to a childhood encounter with the Cantor middle thirds set — a set that is vanishingly small and yet as large as the real numbers. 

What drives her as a teacher is what her own thesis advisor modeled: investing in students as whole people, not just as mathematicians in training. She is happiest in the classroom at the moment a struggling student finally breaks through — not only because the problem is solved, but because of what they discover about themselves in the process. 

Brooks is also someone who knows what it means to navigate the world differently. Diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease in second grade, she has been legally blind most of her life, with her central vision largely lost. It changed the mechanics of how she does things without limiting what she does — she figure skates, bikes, crochets, and thinks best when she is on her feet and moving. 

Outside the classroom and office, she is a devoted wife and mother, an avid reader, and someone who considers toast a genuine comfort food — her family calls her the toast queen. She is curious in every direction, the kind of person who finds beauty in abstract mathematics and in a long walk, and who carries both with equal conviction.