We were pleased to have Prof. Fatma Terzioglu visiting from North Carolina State University, where she serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at NC State. Prior to joining NC State, she was a W. H. Kruskal Instructor at the University of Chicago, where she worked with Guillaume Bal. She received her…
On Thursday, November 13, the STEM Education Center, partnering with numerous organizations at and around WPI (including AWM!), hosted a free community screening and conversation of Counted Out, a powerful documentary that interrogates the way math is taught in schools and explores how math shapes everything from economic opportunity to democracy. From the Counted Out…
On Thursday, the AWM chapter met for our November GBM. We reflected on our October activities (including our fantastic outreach event with BCB Club and second collaboration with SIAM) and looked ahead to November events. In particular, we highlighted the upcoming STEM Education Center-hosted screening of Counted Out, a documentary that interrogates the way math…
In collaboration with the AWM student chapter at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), our AWM chapter co-hosted a virtual session on the graduate experience at five universities scattered around the eastern United States. Lauren Whalen, the president of the AWM chapter at the University of Florida, moderated the panel discussion, which featured Savannah Williams…
Alongside the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), AWM organized a workshop on creating a personal website. The main idea: Whatever your goals — obtaining an internship or job, joining a lab, going to grad school, finding postdoctoral opportunities — a strong online presence can help! We went over the advantages, must-dos, and nice-to-haves…
On Friday, October 24, AWM joined with the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Club at WPI to co-host a mathematical biology-inspired exhibit for Family STEM Night at the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester, an annual event organized as part of Mass STEM Week. The AWM/BCB exhibit was built around a DNA-inspired bracelet/keychain activity. For this…
Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers narrates progress on the Twin Prime Conjecture made from the breakthrough work of Dr. Yitang Zhang in May 2013 (proving the existence of infinitely many pairs of twin primes that are at most 70 million apart) through the incremental “closing of the gap” achieved through the…
Family STEM Night, part of Mass STEM Week, is a free event hosted by the Worcester Boys & Girls Club and the Central MA STEM Network (CMSN) Ecosystem where children, youth, families, and the community can explore the wonders of STEM through hands-on activities, exhibits, and demonstrations presented by colleges, organizations, and businesses. This year,…
Have two players create a 4×4 grid of squares (sixteen squares total). Split the grid into four 2×2 sub-grids (four squares in each). To start, Player 1 places one of the numbers {1, 2, 3, 4} in any of the sixteen squares. Next, Player 2 can place one of the numbers {1, 2, 3, 4}…
The third meeting of the Fall 2025 AWM Book Club was on Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott. Originally published in 1884 as a satire on the gender and social hierarchies of Victorian-era society, Flatland gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, when the sci-fi genre was on the rise, and…