Department of Mathematics & Statistics
Prof. Giorgio Bornia
Music is the place where sounds meet feelings. We play music because we feel. We listen to music because we feel. And guess what? Mathematics—apparently such a cold discipline—takes part in this emotional process. We will explore the world of music through mathematics. In this journey, a good old companion will lead us: the guitar.
Morgan Beetler, MS student
How do the types of plants in our garden affect bee activity? How can we increase our garden’s output? We will plant gardens of tomato plants and flowers in a simulation to make observations and explore possible answers to these questions and more. We will discuss the math behind the model the simulation is based on and apply math to draw conclusions from data we collect.
Prof. Lars Christensen
We learn in geometry class that parallel lines never meet, but every time we let our eyes follow a straight stretch of highway all the way to the horizon, we doubt it. Mathematics has a way to make sense of what we see. In projective geometry, two parallel lines do meet at a point infinitely far away! And, actually, a line and a parabola always have two intersection points—provided that one looks carefully and counts properly.
Prof. Raegan Higgins
This will be a hands-on introduction to difference equations. We will introduce a variety of basic sequences and see how to establish recursive relationships.
Prof. Arne Ledet
Conic sections—circles, ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas—have many interesting properties relating to focus and direction. They also help answer questions like “What does a perspective drawing of a sphere look like?”, where the answer is not the obvious one.
Prof. Travis Thompson
Special proteins help keep our brain running smoothly. Sometimes the brain makes “bad” versions of these proteins. A healthy brain clears them out, but as we age, that cleanup process can fail. Bad proteins can then cause good proteins to turn bad too, contributing to diseases like Alzheimer’s. We can model this with simple mathematical equations. In this talk, students will act out a set of equations that describe the tension between good and bad proteins in this neurodegenerative drama.
Jennifer Wang
A single random process is difficult to predict, but patterns can emerge from many random processes. In this workshop, we will act out a human bean machine and generate random data from a Bernoulli process to observe the emergence of order from chaos.