Ana T. Rico Serfaty (CAS’25, COM’25)

At the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences Department of Mathematics & Statistics graduation ceremony in late-May, Kyle Mickelson (CAS’24, GRS’25), the student speaker, took out his cell phone and read a speech about a math major from a past generation — his maternal grandfather, Nicodemo Ciccia (CAS’58, GRS’65).

Ciccia, a first-generation college student from East Boston known to Mickelson as “Papa” or “Nick,” met Mickelson’s grandmother, Angela (Ferrari) Ciccia (QST’58) while studying at BU. He went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics from the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, which Mickelson also plans to do.

“I find myself in the unique position of saying that I would not exist were it not for BU,” Mickelson read. “Nearly 70 years ago, my grandparents, Nicodemo and Angela Ciccia, met while studying at BU. They played the part of lovers on-stage in a theater production put on by the Italian Club; and, quite conveniently for me, life imitated art, and this year they celebrate their 66th anniversary together.”

But for Mickelson, a pure and applied mathematics major who received the Mathematics & Statistics College Prize from Arts & Sciences at graduation, math was never the plan.

Mickelson arrived at BU as a chemistry major, inspired by a class he took in high school. He realized quickly, however, that while he was intrigued by the mechanisms of chemistry, he didn’t enjoy being in labs and “found goggles very constricting.” He found math through a high school friend and fellow math major and hasn’t stopped studying since.

“I would like to say a large part of why I became a math major was my grandfather, but we never actually had the conversation,” Mickelson said. “It kind of happened accidentally with my interests in the more theoretical sides of the subject.”

Growing up in Essex County, Massachusetts, Mickelson said he often heard stories about his grandfather at BU. Ciccia was born in East Boston two years after his parents arrived from Calabria, Italy with their five children. His father was a tailor, and his three older brothers were apprentice tailors in Italy. The expectation was that Nicodemo would also become a tailor.

When Ciccia was 14, his father passed away. To help support his mother, he began working after school in a tailor shop. Soon after, as Ciccia was about to choose a high school, his grade school teacher talked him out of going to a vocational high school and instead encouraged him to attend a high school that would prepare him for college. Ciccia took her advice, did well in high school, and was accepted at Boston University.

In the first two years at BU, Ciccia took classes part time, four nights a week and Saturday mornings, while working days in a tea factory. In the next 2 years he attended classes during the days and during the summer while working part-time in his brother’s tailor shop. And he also got involved in numerous extracurriculars, including peer tutoring through the math club and serving as president of BU’s Italian Club — both of which led him to meet his future wife, Mickelson’s grandmother, Angela Ferrari. Ciccia’s junior year, he performed in the Italian Club’s play, spoken in Italian, alongside Ferrari. During a celebration after the final performance, Ciccia offered Angela a ride home. He then started tutoring her. This was the beginning of a two-year courtship leading to marriage in September of 1958 — several months after their graduation.

After earning his MA degree and holding numerous software positions, Ciccia joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His first assignment was at an army base on Kwajalein Island, part of the Republic of Marshall Island. The Ciccias moved to Kwajalein, along with their 3 children. From family stories, Mickelson knows the island to be “almost two miles wide, and very thin.” It resembled a typical American suburb, with a little twist — each morning, a small airplane would transport workers, including Ciccia, to another island where they conducted their tests.

After three years, Angela and Nicodemo Ciccia and their children returned to Massachusetts, and Nicodemo Cicccia began working at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. There, he developed scanners that detected train cars in public transportation, page reading scanners for the preservation of historical church documents, and he worked on improving hearing aid technology by reducing detection of background noises. He still holds a few patents in use by the U.S. Navy.

“Throughout my career, I always did research and development involving software,” Ciccia said. “A major in mathematics gives you the ability to solve problems. And you know, the reason you’re in it is because you have that logical way of thinking. So software was kind of a natural thing to me.”

Ciccia recalls his undergraduate days when opportunities for problem-solving through software in BU were limited to only one course, “Numerical Analysis.” He remembers a building on Commonwealth Avenue, right across Marsh Chapel, that housed a massive mainframe computer. Ciccia shared his routine of entering this room everyday, approaching a small window to hand over what he programmed, and patiently waiting for a whole day for the results. Ciccia’s groundbreaking work in this field led Mickelson to believe that his grandfather’s “thing” was not exactly math. “He was a computer science guy before computers existed,” Mickelson said.

After retirement, Ciccia began tutoring Boston high school students in math. And, in the early 2000’s, when he and Angela began spending Winters in Florida, he started tutoring Florida high schoolers. Mickelson proudly remarks, “He is still doing it, and he is 88. He remains passionate about mathematics.”

When Ciccia is in Boston, he stops by campus often on Saturdays to take his grandson out to eat. “He was pretty happy I decided to go to BU,” Mickelson said. “Once a week, in one of the campus restaurants, he tells me different stories over breakfast. His and my grandmother’s life story continues to inspire me.”

Today, Mickelson is helping other students, as his grandfather did. After hearing that most of BU’s math clubs had been inactive for years, Mickelson co-founded a new Math Club, with his good friend Ryan Lee (CAS`24, COM`24). The club was a place for math majors to come together, study, and help one another with questions they might have, while also meeting new people. More than 70 students attended the initial meeting.

“The image of the math major off to the side, sequestered away, it’s very true sometimes. People who study math can be very insular people because it’s a very all-encompassing thing. You can get lost in it,” Mickelson said. “Once I started doing math I couldn’t stop and I did find myself getting lost in it. I wanted to make new connections.”

Like his grandfather, Mickelson plans to continue his mathematical studies, returning to the classroom as a GRS student in the fall. But unlike his grandfather, has discovered a passion for the more theoretical side of the field. He completed an honors thesis, “Hoof Algebras and Hopf-Galois Theory,” and eventually plans to pursue a PhD.

“I was terrible at math as a kid. I didn’t know what math could be. I’d never known there was so much to explore,” Mickelson said. “You’re not using a lot of this theoretical math in your daily life but it teaches you thinking, a way to approach problems, a way to systematize problems and a way to approach the world. I want to continue to use what I’ve learned and go further.”

In his graduation speech, Mickelson focused on gratitude — for his friends and classmates, for his professors and advisors in the mathematics & statistics department, and, of course, for his family.

“It has been a great source of pride to have the chance to study mathematics at BU, following in the footsteps of my grandfather,” he said. “I can only hope to emulate the lasting, positive impact he has had on the world and those around him, both inside the realm of mathematics and outside.”