A revolution in online learning, “Calculus: Single Variable,” Robert Ghrist’s popular Coursera course, contains 16 hours of hand-drawn video, and has attracted more than 130,000 students from all over the world. In 2013, it also became one of the first Coursera offerings approved for accreditation by the American Council on Education.

Ghrist, the Andrea Mitchell University Professor of Mathematics and Electrical & Systems Engineering with appointments in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, works at the intersection of applied mathematics, systems engineering, and topology—the mathematical study of abstract space. The result brings a theoretical area of study off the page and into the real world. Ghrist is one of 15 Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professors, a group of researchers and scholars whose world-renowned work bridges multiple academic disciplines.