Center for Women in Mathematics at Smith College

On April 24th, Mark Lewis of Cornell University came to talk to the department about his research, as well as about the Operations Research program at Cornell University. His abstract follows:

Each month a new problem is posted on the noticeboard just outside Burton 302.

April's problem is as follows:

Find the exact value of ∑ k²/7^k for k =1, 2,...,∞.

Today is 03/03/09, or as Yahoo News tells us, the third of 9 square root days this century. Celebrate!

Kelvin Mischo, a sales rep from Wolfram Research, presented new features of Mathematica 7.0 to the department.

On Tuesday, February 10, John McLeary of Vassar College delivered a lunch lecture based on his recent readings of Poincaré in the original French. The abstract for his talk follows:

Presenter: Megan Kerr, Wellesley College

Presenter: Leslie Hogben, Iowa State University, American Institute for Mathematics

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~lhogben/homepage.html

Given a graph, finding the associated matrix of minimum rank is generally an open problem. Professor Hogben introduced her work on the problem in her lecture; an abstract is provided below:

"You can't really take Real Analysis at night school." (Samantha Oestricher)

Yeah. This nicely encapsulates the post-baccalaureate need filled by the Center.

Many interesting things happen at Smith. Just the other day, I looked out of my office window and saw...

...sculptures being made of Leonardo Da Vinci sticks. Here they are close up, after completion: