by Prof. Lauren Childs Imagine a SARS outbreak in quaint Williamstown – that’s exactly what Varun Bhadkamkar ’17, Anthony Brooks ’16, Jack Ferguson ’17, Connor Mulhall ’17, and Annie Sher ’17 did in their Math 307 final project. The SARS group built a network model of the Williams College undergraduate… Continue reading »
This spring, I presented my senior colloquium on a topological game called the Banach-Mazur Game. This game was formulated by Stanislaw Mazur in 1935. It is the earliest example of an infinite game with perfect information. The game proceeds as follows. Continue reading. . John Damstra is a… Continue reading »
Our very own Professor Palsson was featured on the show Meet & Potatoes on WilliNet, the community television for Williamstown. During the show a number of topics were covered including several mathematical in nature. Professor Palsson gave a shout out to the weekly Math Puzzle Dinners – come try them… Continue reading »
In a remarkable new paper, Maryna Viazovska has put forth a proof of a most efficient way to pack unit spheres in dimension 8. In a follow-up paper, Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Viazovska have a similar result in dimension 24. Continue reading »
I’ve had a lot of fun with some cubing events recently in Williamstown. The first was an official cube event organized by local student Ric Donati. For results see https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/results/c.php?top3=Top+3&competitionId=WilliamsWinter2016 http://cubecomps.com/live.php?cid=1377 The second was earlier today, a cube workshop run by myself and my son, Cameron, at… Continue reading »
This is a sequel to an earlier post: To bead, or not to bead. In that post my daughter Kayla and I did a fuse bead picture of the Fibonacci spiral, and we talked about how it can be used to give a geometric proof to the sum of… Continue reading »
by Gabriel Ngwe ’17 “The Magic of Math” is a book on general mathematics which aims to reveal the underlying magic. What lies behind “The Magic of Math” is the same thing that lies behind magic in general: manipulation and redirection. These themes underlie the book, and Arthur… Continue reading »
by Nam Nguyen ‘19 Numbers and basic computation appeared in Ancient Egypt as early as 2700 BCE. But you might not know that Ancient Egyptians demanded that every fraction have 1 in the numerator. They wanted to write any rational between 0 and 1 as a sum of such “unit”… Continue reading »
by Sarah Fleming Over Dead Week, Nina Pande and I attended the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We had a wonderful experience, and we are grateful to the Clare Boothe Luce Program and the Math Department for providing us with the… Continue reading »
The AMS Williams Student Chapter and SMASAB joined forces yesterday in organizing a special event called Lightning Talks by Thesis Students. This event, which was exclusively for students, gave attendees an opportunity to listen to brief thesis presentations and learn about some cool new math problems. Listen to Greg… Continue reading »