The math department presents...


Sonia Kovalevsky Day

Sat. May 13th


SK Day is a math day (starting in the morning until early afternoon) for middle and high school girls. Help out on hands-on workshops (led by graduate students) or speak as a panel member to discuss women in math!


If you are interested, please reply back to this email with your name, year, and for which workshop you would like to help out!


This event is held in Kemeny.


The workshops are:


The Number Games: Survival of the Brainiacs

Angie Babei and Sara Chari


What do paying your friend, filling your water bottle, and stopping a super villain have in common? Number theory! Many of the developments in modern mathematics came from games and puzzles of ancient times.  In this workshop we will discover this exciting branch of mathematics by playing some real-life games. The topics we will cover are finding an algorithm to calculate the greatest common divisor of two numbers, modular arithmetic, and the Chinese Remainder Theorem.




Tilings, Counting, and Symmetry

Emma Hartman and Lizzie Tripp


Imagine sitting in front of a chess board with a pile of dominoes. How many ways could you arrange the dominoes on the board so that every square was covered and no domino was hanging off the board? What if we changed the shape of our chess board, or replaced dominoes with a different shape? Given a board and a set of tiles, can we tell when such a covering is possible? In this workshop, we’ll explore a variety of puzzles like this, called tiling problems.



The Fold-Cut Theorem

Melanie Dennis and Kate Moore


If you fold a piece of paper into quarters, you can cut a diamond out of the middle with just one cut. What other shapes can you make? How many cuts do they take? In this workshop, we will use folding to minimize the amount of cuts you need to cut out a shape. Starting with diamonds, triangles and squares, we will figure out what shapes you can cut out with only one cut.