The 2007 Fall Student Mathematics Symposium was held on Thursday November 15
at West Virginia University, with presentations taking place in the Rhododendron
Room of the Mountainlair. The Symposium gives high achieving students a chance
to learn about novel areas of mathematics, focusing on interactive presentations
by college faculty. This event is cosponsored by the Department of Mathematics
at WVU and the West Virginia Council of Teachers of Mathematics. It has been
offered annually since it was founded in 1990. The first campus coordinator
was the late Professor James Dowdy, a former WVU faculty member and WVCTM Vice-President.
This year there were forty student participants representing nine schools (Buckhannon-Upshur,
Clay-Battelle, Keyser High School, Morgantown High School, Preston, Suncrest,
University High, Wheeling Park, and Wirt County). Deloris Lipps (Wirt County)
and Annette Martino (Suncrest) were able to attend with their students.
The Symposium included three formal presentations.
The first talk was given by Professor
John Goldwasser, entitled "The case for circuit boards on a doughnut."
He started with the famous "utility problem" about connecting three
utilities to three houses without having any of the utility lines cross, and
generalized that to decide when a graph can be embedded in the plane. After
a pleasant journey through Euler's formula and Kuratowski's theorem, it turns
out that a doughnut shaped region allows more flexibility in embedding.
(Click picture to see Professor Goldwasser explain an embedding)
Professor Matt Pascal conducted the second session on "The game of EQUATIONS." This is a famous mathematical board game that promotes creative thinking to find combinations of given numbers and operations to generate a target number. After he explained the rules, he enlisted the help of math majors and graduate students to serve as referees for several rounds of student games. Schools were given a copy of the game to take home with them for later play.
(Click picture to see Professor Pascal explain the game)
Professor Margie Darrah conducted the last session, entitled "The genetic algorithm." She motivated the talk by recalling her experiences in industry, and a project that required her team to program autonomous pilotless airplanes. She illustrated the approach by leading teams of students to "evolve" solutions to an equation by combining the best solutions from a previous generation.
(Click picture to see Professor Darrah welcome everyone)
In the best tradition of the Student Math Symposium, all of the presenters
engaged the students in discovering parts of their final results, with "homework"
suggesting problems and projects for further study and research.
Student participants were:
Matt Ahern
Aaron Bennett *
Sean Bernatowicz
Becky Bolyard
Zachary Chancey
Brian Chen
Emily Coburn
Adam Cook
Cody Cutright
Dakota Davis *
Samet Demircan
Skylar Denney
Billy Fang *
Erica Fitzsimmons
Kristen Gaudino
Gar Gautam
Richard Goff
Alicia Harmon
Jessica Harvey
Jonathan Hensel
Sara Kurian
James Lee
Lisa Liang
Tommy Liu *
Stewart Lynch
Andy Maloney
Brittany Martino
Neel Patel
Zachary Phipps
Sarah Robinson
Richael Saxon
Stephen Semmens
Alissa Sun *
Matthew Swenson
Brandon Ullman
John Ward
Sara Wheeler
Ezekiel Willett *
Kyrie Williams
Chelsea Willis
* - Multi year attendee