OFF ON A TANGENT
A Fortnightly Electronic Newsletter from the Hope College Department of Mathematics
February 19, 2003 Vol. 1, No. 9



Summer opportunities for research deadline is next week

The deadline for applying to do research this summer at Hope is next week Friday, February 28.   This coming summer, professors Aaron Cinzori, Tim Pennings, and Darin Stephenson will be the research mentors.  Although students apply from all over the country, Hope students are given special consideration.  So if you are interested, see the web site at http://www.math.hope.edu/reu.html for more details.  


Hope students participate in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling

While many of us were home enjoying winter break in some typical fashion, Michael Cortez and Heather Mentzer were enjoying their break working on the Mathematical Contest in Modeling.  Throughout the weekend they worked on and submitted a solution to the following problem.
==The Stunt Person==

An exciting action scene in a movie is going to be filmed, and you are the stunt coordinator! A stunt person on a motorcycle will jump over an elephant and land in a pile of cardboard boxes to cushion his or her fall. You need to protect the stunt person, and also use relatively few cardboard boxes (lower cost, not seen by camera, etc.).  Your job is to determine what size boxes to use, determine how many boxes to use, determine how the boxes will be stacked, determine if any modifications to the boxes would help, generalize to different combined weights (stunt person & motorcycle) and different jump heights   Note that, in "Tomorrow Never Dies," the James Bond character on a motorcycle jumps over a helicopter.

Congratulations go out to Heather and Michael for participating in this competition.
 

Surfing the Web

Next semester a course in the history of mathematics will be taught at Hope for the first time in a long while.  Professor Stoughton will be teaching MATH 321: History of mathematics on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:00-12:50.  Because of this, I thought I would look at a mathematics history web site in this column again.  Last semester, I looked at the most comprehensive site on the Web for information about the history of mathematics, the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive located at http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/.  This time, I would like to focus in a bit more to look at a site devoted to problems.  The Math Forum has a site called Famous Problems in the History of Mathematics.  It is located at http://mathforum.org/isaac/mathhist.html.  This site contains links to problems involving the bridges of Konigsberg, the value of pi, puzzling primes, famous paradoxes, the problem of points, a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, a  proof that e is irrational.  In addition to the problems in history site, the Math Forum is a fairly comprehensive site devoted to mathematics education.  The site includes links to "Ask Dr. Math," problems of the week, and an Internet mathematics library to name a few.


Students attend mathematics conference

Professor Pennings and a number of Hope students recently attended the Michigan Undergraduate Mathematics Conference held at the University of Michigan at Dearborn on Saturday, February 15.  Hope student Brian Yurk gave a talk about applications of group theory to mineral crystal symmetry.  Professor Pennings gave his popular talk "Do Dogs Know Calculus?" and presented information about the REU at Hope.  Students Andrew Wells, Kyle Williams, Ryan Weaver, and Brandon Alleman also attended.


Tomorrow's colloquium topic is fractals

The next mathematics colloquium is scheduled for Thursday, February 20 at 4:00 p.m. in VWF 237.  At this time, Airat Bekmetjev of Gettysburg College will present "Fractals everywhere: The Geometry of Nature."  Professor Bekmetjev will show that the observation by Mandelbrot of the existence of a "Geometry of Nature" has led us to think in a new scientific way about the edges of clouds, the shapes of trees, the intricate arrangements of the feathers of a flying bird.  He will show how fractal geometry can be used to make models of physical structures from fern to galaxies. The goal of this talk is to provide a general understanding of fractals and their applications. The most important results and methods used in fractal geometry will be presented.  An introduction to Julia sets and Mandelbrot sets will also be given.


An additional summer opportunity for mathematics majors

The University of Washington (UW) is running a Summer Institute for Mathematics this summer for talented high schools students from the Pacific Northwest. They are in the process of recruiting undergraduates to serve as teaching assistants.  The teaching assistants will learn some mathematics, spend a portion of their summer in Seattle, receive a stipend, and get to know the faculty who come from UW, Microsoft, and the University of Chicago.  

The teaching assistants will work with the high school students in and outside of class and join them in social activities. Each student who is chosen to serve as a teaching assistant will be paid a stipend of $1800 for the six weeks (June 22- Aug 2). In addition, each participant will have (single) room and board provided on campus.  For more information about this program or to download an application for a teaching assistantship visit http://www.math.washington.edu/~simuw/index.html.


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