Danilo Diedrichs is a Renaissance man. Although now a professor and the department chair of mathematics at Wheaton, his areas of expertise span further than the classroom.
He has a private pilot’s license, figure skates, plays the piano and has even discovered a newfound passion for plant identification through his membership at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Ill.
Aviation and skating have been his passions since his childhood in Geneva, Switzerland. As a boy, he loved to go to the airport and watch the precise sequencing of planes taking off and landing. When he was seven years old, he did a presentation on planes for a school project.
However, according to Dietrichs, acquiring a pilot’s license in Switzerland is “pretty much impossible, unless you are extremely wealthy or go through the military.” So, after moving to the U.S. in 1997, he started ground school at the DuPage County Airport the following year and earned his private pilot’s license.
Diedrichs said he loves the freedom of flying wherever he wants without being constrained by roads. For Diedrichs, the independence and precision of aviation are sources of joy. He likened the challenge of flying to a Swiss clock.
“There’s no chaos, there’s no ambiguity and everything goes like clockwork,” he said.
Learning to fly in the Chicagoland area is not necessarily recommended since Chicago has one of the most congested airspaces in the world. Despite this challenge, Diedrichs relishes the complexity of approaching the runway along with 20 other airplanes.
“They sequence you according to complex patterns of different altitudes,” he said. “You feel like you’re one of the players in a very organized game.”
Video by Maggie Reibel.
For Diedrichs, figure skating has a similar appeal. There is a unique emotional and bodily freedom that comes with skating, he explained. With perfectly sharp blades and smooth ice, Diedrichs said you can experience zero friction.
“It’s a magical sensation that I don’t think you can replicate in any other way,” he said. Like aviation, skating is also very technical. “It’s a precision sport where if one of those elements is not perfectly executed, the whole thing falls apart.”
Skating requires you to follow specific geometric patterns on the ice and master the precise biomechanics of how and where to position your body. The skater must know where their center of gravity is and which edge of the blade they are on.
According to Diedrichs, the reward of mastering such a difficult skill is an exhilarating feeling of success. “Nothing is left to chance and everything works in concert.”
At the University of Iowa, he trained and competed with the United States Figure Skating Association (USFSA). He competed at the adult gold level, the fourth of eight possible levels of the adult figure skating tests. This adult track is separate from the standard track that leads to the Olympics and allows adults 21 and older to continue to compete on a level playing field.
Diedrichs compared his passions for aviation and skating to dynamical systems theory, his professional area of specialty in mathematics. All three disciplines involve freedom combined with precision and structure.
“My whole life is oriented around studying patterns that evolve in space and time according to strict structures and constraints, yet which allow a lot of freedom,” he said.
Diedrichs graduated with a master’s degree in civil engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2009, he earned a master’s degree in mathematics and a PhD in applied mathematical and computational science from the University of Iowa. He has been teaching at Wheaton College ever since.
Maddie Wetzel, a junior secondary education and math major, is one of Deidrichs’ students. She said that while Deidrichs doesn’t often discuss his hobbies, they occasionally come up in conversation. For example, Wetzel recalled one Sunday morning running into Diedrichs at a Starbucks as he was coming back from skating practice before heading to church.
Despite his unique talents, however, Wetzel said he doesn’t discuss them much in class. “He’s really humble about it,” she said.
Jakob Hildebrandt, a senior majoring in math and German, described another instance of Diedrichs’ hobbies randomly coming up in conversation. Hildebrandt recalled Diedrichs mentioning how sometimes he would go to the skating rink in the morning and change in his office before his next class.
Hildebrandt emphasized how inspiring Diedrichs’ example is and said “he serves as a huge inspiration to me to go and pursue my passions, and to work hard to achieve my goals.”
For Wetzel, not only are Diedrichs’ hobbies interesting, but knowing about them humanizes him in her perspective. She said that sometimes students see professors merely as some “evil” person assigning work. Diedrichs shows he isn’t just a professor.
“He’s really interested in math, but he’s interested in other things, too, which is good and cool because I think our whole lives shouldn’t just be our careers,” Wetzel said.
Balancing between his career and his other interests has not always been easy for Diedrichs. He said it is challenging to have enough time and energy to pursue his passions. His interests are always alive, he said, though there are seasons when he focuses more on one than another. While competing with the USFSA, he devoted a lot of time and energy to his training and put his other interests on hold. Now a professor, he still skates, but only two or three times a week, and he no longer participates in big competitions.
As he gets older, Diedrichs said he is not able to perform at the same level that he used to and has to adjust his expectations. Diedrichs said several of his fellow faculty members who were former athletes have had a similar experience. Together they are realizing they cannot do things at the same level as when they were in their twenties, but that doesn’t stop them.
“They’re disciplined and not letting go of their passions,” Diedrichs said. “That’s the place I’m at.”
