Dr. Elliot Tanis, Professor Emeritus of mathematics at Hope College, has co-authored a new book A Brief Course in Mathematical Statistics with Dr. Robert Hogg, a retired professor of statistics from the University of Iowa.  Dr. Tanis's son Joel, who is an artist, painted the illustration for the cover of the book.  Dr. Tanis is the author of four books and 30 publications on statistics and is a past chairman and governor of the Michigan MAA, which presented him with both its Distinguished Teaching and Distinguished Service Awards.  He taught at Hope for 35 years and in 1989 received the HOPE Award (Hope's Outstanding Professor Educator) for his excellence in teaching.  In addition to his academic interests, Dr. Tanis is also an avid tennis player and devoted Hope sports fan.


Bowlizza: The Mathematics Department's Annual Bowling and Pizza Extravaganza

Mark your calendars and save the date! 

At 11:00 am on Saturday, February 17, the Math Department will be hosting its annual bowling and pizza party.  We'll meet at Holland Bowling Center, located at the corner of 9th and Central, and after a couple games of bowling return to the math department for pizza.  Students and professors alike will engage in friendly competition for a variety of noteworthy feats (e.g. highest score, most strikes, largest standard deviation), with prizes for the winners.

Sign up sheets will be passed around in your classes.  There will also be a sign up sheet on Professor Pearson's door (VWF 212) for you to sign up before noon on Friday, February 16.  A reminder will be sent in the next issue of the newsletter.  We hope you'll be able to join us!

Fibonacci's Garden: Art of Mathematics Lecture

• Matt Boelkins, GVSU
  
• Thursday, February 8 at 7:00 pm
• Loutit Lecture Hall 102 on Grand Valley State's Allendale Campus
  
• Reception with refreshments in the Henry Atrium after the talk
• Admission is free
  

By 300 BC, Euclid and other Greek mathematicians were aware of a number with special properties linked to proportion in geometric figures. Specially divided line segments, aesthetic rectangles, and regular pentagons all exhibited an amazing number that later came to be known as "the Golden Ratio."  The Golden Ratio has since made many appearances in surprising places in mathematics, including rather recently in symmetries in Penrose tilings, and has also manifested itself in curious ways in art, architecture, and the natural world.

Around 1200 AD, Leonardo of Pisa (known to us today as Fibonacci) began experimenting with a sequence of numbers that has since come to bear his name.  The list of numbers generated by starting with 0 and 1 and then adding the two previous numbers to find the next term results in


and is called "the Fibonacci Sequence." This collection of numbers has been discovered to have a seemingly unlimited list of interesting properties that fascinate mathematicians to this day. Like the Golden Ratio, Fibonacci numbers arise naturally in some startling places. One example is seen in pine cones, where the numbers of spirals exhibited on the pine cone in opposing directions normally turn out to be consecutive Fibonacci numbers.

Perhaps even more remarkably, the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Sequence are inextricably linked with each other. After an introduction to some of the history and mathematical ideas surrounding each of these concepts separately, we will explore how the development of seeds in flowers demonstrates some of these connections between the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Sequence.


Math In Action

Math education students--you are invited to attend Math In Action, a conference sponsored by Grand Valley State University for area teachers and education students. This event will be held on Thursday, February 22 at the Eberhard Center in downtown Grand Rapids. Professor Mary DeYoung plans to attend and she would be happy to have you join her.

The math department will pay your registration fee. More info and a registration form are available online at:


Your completed registration forms should be turned in to Professor DeYoung by Monday, February 5.


GRE Information Session

• Tuesday, February 6 
  
• 5:00 - 6:00 pm
• SC 1000

Professor Charles Behensky of the Psychology Department will conduct an information session on the Graduate Record Examination on Tuesday, February 6 from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. in SC 1000.  Professor Behensky will discuss the mechanics of the GRE, what students might do to prepare for the exam, and answer questions.  Juniors thinking about graduate school in any area are especially encouraged to attend, although anyone with a possible interest in graduate studies is welcome.

Students interested in taking the GRE might also want to take advantage of two other campus resources:

• Career Service’s GRE web page provides information on the GRE, and announces the availability of some practice test software: http://www.hope.edu/student/career/resources/GradTests.htm
  
• The Van Wylen Library has access to Learn A Test, an online practice exam package that includes two sample quantitative ability exams and two sample verbal ability GRE exams. Go to the library’s home page, select Databases for Research; then go to the A-Z listing; then select LearningExpress Library.  From the list of available exams on the right side of the screen choose Graduate School Entrance Exams.

Actuary Exam Approaching

Congratulations to Dan Emmendorfer on passing Actuarial Exam 1/P!  Five other Hope students will take the exam in February.  Students who want to learn more about being an actuary can visit www.beanactuary.org or talk with Professor Tintle.


This Day in Mathematics History . . .

On January 31, 1715, Giovanni Francesco Fagnano dei Toschi was born.  A lesser known figure in the history of mathematics, Fagnano was ordained as a priest and later appointed canon of the cathedral in Sinigaglia and eventually archpriest.  Throughout his life he maintained an avocational interest in mathematics.  His primary contributions were to calculus, where he computed the formulas (now well known to Calculus students everywhere)
and
He also used integration by parts to compute the integrals of xⁿsin(x) and xⁿcos(x), and proved a well known result in geometry: for any triangle T, the triangle whose vertices are the bases of the altitudes of T has these altitudes as the bisectors of its angles.  To read more about Fagnano, please visit http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Fagnano_Giovanni.html.


By the numbers . . . .

Facts to ponder:

$9,159	Average credit card debt per household as of January 1, 2006
$2,966	Average credit card debt per household as of December 31, 1990
$3.5 billion	Amount spent for the privilege of using credit cards with annual fees
$14.8 billion	Annual amount levied on cardholders in late and over-limit penalties
$16 billion	Total profits in 2005 for 10 largest US credit card issuers

Hmm. . . .

Problem of the Fortnight 

On a beautiful January afternoon a few days ago, I was sitting at my desk, trying to conjure up another problem of the fortnight.  Not having much luck, I looked out the window and was amazed to see a red-tailed hawk had perched itself on a limb of the tree outside my window.  It was an awe-inspiring sight!  During this unexpected bird-watching, I must have been idly clicking my mechanical pencil because when the hawk flew away and I got back to business, I noticed that a piece of lead about 1 cm in length had broken off and fallen onto the notepad of lined paper on my desk.  Just then I realized that the problem I had been searching for had quite literally fallen out of my pencil.

If a 1 cm piece of lead falls randomly onto a notepad of lined paper, where the lines are 1 cm apart, what is the probability that the piece of lead will intersect one of the horizontal lines?

Write your solution to the back of a picture of a red-tailed hawk and drop it on the Problem of the Fortnight slot outside Dr. Pearson's office (VWF 212) by 3:00 pm on Friday, February 9.  As always, please be sure to include your name, your math class(es), and your professor(s) -- e.g. Carrie D. One, Math 101 (Longhand Multiplication), Professor Abacus -- on your solution.

Problem Solvers of the Fortnight 

Congratulations to Petya Dodova, Jonathan Winnie, Jon Moerdyk, Brian McClellan, Nate Johnson, Sam Baker, Steph Pasek, Sarah Dean, Nathan Wiersma, Lydia Hurd, Peter Doorn, Chelsea Miedema, Katie Johnson, Steven Barbachyn, Karena Schroeder, Jeffrey Meyers, Allison Pautler, Stephanie Dreyer, Beth Olson, Brianna Wynne, Jeff Shriner, Emily Wandell, Clint Jepkema, Luc Leavenworth, Lauren Kucera, Rebecca Baker, Brian Lajiness, Jackie Lewis, Laura Shears, Ashley O'Shaughnessey, Kariayne Cozzie, Ryan Johnson, Greg Huizen, Samantrha Dunmire, Mallory Chapman, Joey Goeb, Jamie Lajiness, Jason Folkert, Beth Heisel, Mandy Ferguson, Paul Frybarger, Emily Walsh, Bryan McMahon, Dave DeBoer, Josh Warner, Matt Glahn, Laura Smallegan, Austin Castle, Dayna Waters, Grace Olson, Jeanne Oxendine, Brianne O'Connell, Nick Papes, Erica Brandt, Eileen Sanderson, Kim Harrison, Joel Blok, Nicole Smith, Dale Shepherd, Ban Barkel, Layne Fowler, Mark Gilmore, Joel Mulder, Chris Ploch, Daryl Andresen, Becky Lathrop, Zach Petroelje, Tim Wahmhoff, Jessica Clouse, Chelsea Lynes, Dave McMahon, Jill Immink, Jeff Ambrose, Chris Hall, David Visser, Evan Van Heukelom, Sarah Havlik, Izzy Glas, Nate Bowerman, Laura Schaedig, Marti Ebert, Ben Gorsky and Heidi Snyder.  The solution to the Sudoku puzzle is shown above.

Thanks to all who submitted their solution on the back of a portrait of Euler!  Special thanks to: Nate Johnson for submitting his solution on the back of a picture of Ulf von Euler, who won the 1970 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology but whose contributions to mathematics remain obscure; Luke Leavenworth for submitting his solution on the back of a picture of Warren Moon, his favorite Houston "Euler"; and Bryan McMahon for capturing Euler's genius at work in the cartoon above at left.

Fifty-Cent Book Sale! The book sale is still going!  Stop by VWF 222 to look at the available books, and when you find one, drop off $0.50 in the math department office.  What a deal!

Math Teaching Opportunity in Ecuador

A letter from one of our graduates:

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Greetings,

My name is Kyle Williams and I graduated from Hope in May of 2006.  I am currently working as a math teacher in a private elementary school called Centro Educativo Amauta, located in the outskirts of Loja, Ecuador, a city of approximately 150,000 in the Andes mountains in the south of the country.   I am writing to ask for your assistance in finding someone to replace me here in the coming academic year.  I would eventually like to establish an exchange program between Hope and Amauta so that each year a recent graduate would come down here and teach and have the experience of living in a foreign country and perfecting their Spanish.   The school here and the whole country are truly wonderful and magical - it is definitely a worthwhile experience.

The school is unique in Loja (and one of only a few in all of Ecuador) for its use of a pedagogical philosophy based on the work of Piaget and the theory of constructivism (this is in spite of the rather conservative educational philosophy of the government here).   It is a very progressive and dynamic education and I have learned so much in my time here.  There are a total of 55 children in the school in 9 groups that cover a range from kindergarten to about 5th grade.   I only work with the older kids which ends up being about 35 students in 6 groups.  Thus, I am in direct contact with each and every student every day and am able to give lots of individual attention.

As for compensation, the school provides me with a place to live (a beautiful little house here in the mountains), two meals a day, and an additional $150 a month, which is more than enough to live and do a little traveling here. The school year here starts mid-September.   For more information about my experience, I have a website with all my journals and photos at http://www.bluedoorproject.com/kw.

We are looking for someone who has had experience with children and is willing to learn and work with a somewhat original educational system..   They should also have a decent amount of experience in Spanish as all teaching is in Spanish.  In addition, as the position is that of a math teacher, they should have at least enough math background to be comfortable teaching up to 6th grade level math – fractions, decimals, multiplication, division, etc.

I would be very grateful if you could share this email with your students and have any interested parties contact me at kyle.w.williams@gmail.com for more information about the position.   Thanks in advance for your collaboration in this little project of mine.

Sincerely,
Kyle Williams

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