Panel Discussion: Mathematical Contests

This panel will describe various mathematics contests available for K-12 students, and opportunities for college faculty to help with these contests.  The panel includes: Janice Kowalcyck (Robotics Contest), Paul Bannon (Math Counts), and representatives from the mathematics Olympiad.

Our panel of K-12 educators will describe the standards (recently revised in 2000) and how these standards will effect the teaching of mathematics in K-16.  Our panel includes: Terry Coes, Chair and teacher at Rocky Hill School in East Greenwich, RI, Dr. John Long, Mathematics Education at University of Rhode Island, and Dr. James Sedlock, Mathematics Department, Rhode Island College.

 This workshop, intended for people with little or no experience with Sketchpad, will demonstrate how to make simple constructions.

This workshop will demonstrate activities that demonstrate higher level capabilities of the software.  The leaders will assume that participants are familiar with Sketchpad or have completed the Beginner Workshop described above.

Consider the classic spring model found in most undergraduate courses in differential equations.  If we add a rubber band, that makes the equation slightly nonlinear and dramatic counterintuitive results occur.  We will see multiple solutions for the same equation and discover a startling sensitivity of the equation to initial conditions.  Solutions are found by combining some programming with a standard mathematical software package.  Also, we will discuss a real-life application of Newton’s method to current research.  This work was done by an undergraduate completing an honor’s project at Rhode Island College.

This presentation will report on a semester-long sabbatical experience that Donna Beers had as a software author and developer at MathSoft, Inc.  Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MathSoft provides innovative tools for technical calculation, math and science education, and data analysis.  It is well known to the mathematics community for the software Mathcad. This talk will address the questions: What are the benefits of a sabbatical spent working in industry? How did I go about finding a position? How did I use mathematics in the job? What was it like to work outside the academy?   The presentation will include a demonstration by Beth Porter of some of the features of Mathcad 2000.

Paul Erdos (1913 - 1996), often referred to as a mathematical Mozart and the Euler of our age, was one of the most gifted and prolific mathematicians of the twentieth century.  Erdos wrote or co-authored  nearly 1500 scholarly papers in number theory, geometry, graph theory, combinatorics, Ramsey theory, and many other fields.  He also made an astounding number of significant conjectures and helped create new areas  of mathematics such as extremal graph theory and probabilistic number  theory.  His life style and personality was nearly as unique and interesting as his work.  In this talk we will pay tribute to Paul Erdos - the mathematician and the person himself.

This talk will trace the development of several of Escher's geometrical prints from the original tilings in the Moorish palace, through his sketches of the tilings, to his transformation of the Alhambra's abstract patterns into the familiar bird and lizard tessellations seen on t-shirts around the world.

Here I will share some recent experiments in Pre-calculus, Calculus, and Math for Liberal Arts courses.  Wild departures from conventional wisdom will be confessed and demonstrations of both the high-tech and no-tech varieties will be given.

Math teachers are the outreach workers of a special congregation which has research mathematicians at its center. Each of us has our own “themes” which we bring to the students we serve. Perhaps, the most useful theme is the summation of ideas, both math and otherwise, which are contained in any collection of 150 word problems that are personally meaningful. For instance, it is fair to say word problems are the reason that math was invented in the first place. Another way to look at it is the following. Each word problem is a pilgrimage during which things are conjured up that render judgements and, even, decisions more effective.  Successful pilgrimages become actual events in our life. Each of our students will eventually have to make significant human decisions that will be based on the total life experience to that point. With 150 word problems, we arm them with dispositions and a state of mind that better prepare them for decisions.

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