“It’s better to be right than fast.” This, in a nutshell, is John Mighton’s credo. The shy, soft-spoken man is talking—slowly, of course—about his own meandering pilgrimage to establish himself, plodding step by plodding step, as an internationally respected writer, mathematician and teacher. His heady plays have garnered him accolades (most notably the $100,000 Siminovitch Prize for a distinguished body of work); his mathematical research, in graph and knot theory, is groundbreaking; and the organization he founded to help children master arithmetic has expanded, well, exponentially.

In the vast atrium of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Science at U of T (where he has an office), this round-faced 49-year-old, with a tonsured head to match his monkish disposition, trashes the belief that success in math is genetically predetermined. He earnestly echoes the arguments he makes in his new book, The End of Ignorance: “If we put walls around our national parks and said no one can come in here except a few gifted people, we’d think that was nuts. But we’ve done that with mathematics.”

Nature metaphors come easily to Mighton. A Hamilton native, he grew up exploring the forested escarpment and transformed his bedroom into a personal museum with seashells and models of animal skeletons. Charity began but didn’t end at the Mighton home; he was the sixth child of a surgeon and public-spirited nurse. “She did every­thing,” he says. “She helped open a women’s shelter, hosted African students studying here, raised funds for the United Way.”

After receiving disappointing marks in his calculus and creative writing classes at U of T, he switched to philosophy, earning a master’s. In the ’70s, he taught informal logic at McMaster. But he really wanted to write. “I read Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home and saw how she turned herself into a writer through sheer determination.” Teaching himself to write poetry, he learned the basic lesson of his life, the underpinning of all his subsequent success: break a big task down into tiny ones.

He drifted to New York in 1982, where he continued writing poetry, supporting himself as a nanny. The Manhattan avant-garde theatre and performance art scene soon drew him away from verse to drama, and he produced several plays: one mounted at 3 a.m. in an all-night festival, another in a theatre that lost power on opening night. But the nanny­ing paled, so he returned to Toronto in 1987. Though he continued writing dramas, usually about science and philosophy, and saw his works produced at the alt-playhouses, he still wasn’t making a living. The critics savaged Possible Worlds on its 1991 debut at the Berkeley Street Theatre. “In Canada, you usually have one chance, and if the wrong critic shows up in the wrong mood, you’ve had it.” But a sideline gig as a math tutor to make ends meet was yielding spectacular results—children who’d been floundering began to swim adeptly.