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…
On Thursday, the AWM hosted a meet-and-greet with the newest female faculty members of the Department of Mathematical Sciences: Prof. Charlotte (Charly) Fowler (joined in fall 2024) and Prof. Jane Ivy Coons (joined in fall 2025). We are excited to have them with us at WPI! After brief introductions about academic paths, research interests, and…
For the second meeting of the Fall 2025 AWM Book Club, we read Proof, by David Auburn, a short play about mathematics and madness. Proof won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. It premiered on Broadway in 2000 at the Walter Kerr Theatre and ran until 2003. In…
At the first of our monthly GBMs this semester, we were happy to welcome some new members to the chapter, share about upcoming events, and hear activity ideas from the general body. It was a small but engaged group! We ended the GBM with an arts & crafts activity to make your own (mini) SET…
For our first AWM Book Club meeting of Fall 2025, we read the chapter “Mathematical Institutions and the ‘In’ of the Association for Women in Mathematics” from AWM’s 50th anniversary collection Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM, the full text of which is available through Springer.…
It was a beautiful day – sunny but cool – for our annual Welcome Event! We host a Welcome Event each year, complete with pizza, cookies, soda, and lawn games, to introduce AWM to new WPI members and say hello to returning ones. This year, we had over two dozen newcomers and many familiar faces…