SUNY New Paltz is pleased to host the fourth annual Spuyten Duyvil Undergraduate Mathematics Conference. This one day conference will feature presentations by undergraduate students and faculty in mathematics and related disciplines. There will be concurrent panels on undergraduate research and careers in mathematics. The conference is absolutely free, there is no registration fee and those who preregister (see sidebar) before the deadline of April 1st will receive a complementary lunch and refreshments.
Keynote Address:
Dr. Richard Askey
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mathematics from the comic strip Fox Trot
One place one never expects to find interesting mathematics is a comic strip. However, the following problem appeared in Bill Amend's Fox Trot about ten years ago:
With the exception of one result of Euler, which will be described, all that is needed to find the sum of this series is taught in calculus. However, some of the tools we will use are not used this way in calculus. You know about changing variables in an integral, but have you ever thought about changing variables in a sum? When you start to think about it, it seems silly. Yet, it can be useful, not only to help find the sum of the series above, but to do some surprising and important mathematics. One example is how to find the sum of a series which is an approximation to the normal integral, the integral on the real line of exp(-x2).
The goal of the conference is to offer undergraduates the opportunity to attend and actively participate in a professional mathematics meeting. Students may apply for a 15 minute talk or submit a poster.
Registration will close on APRIL 1, 2009
Please help us publicize this conference. Here's a link to the .pdf file for the poster.
Contacts:
Conference Director: Diego Dominici
Steering Committee: Kathryn Weld Manhattan College; Fred Rickey, USMA; Lauren Rose, Bard College ; Tracy Baldwin McGrail, Marist College; S. Jane Fritz, St Joseph’s College; Margaret Robinson, Mount Holyoke College ; Anna Haensch, Wesleyan University ; and Joe Kirtland, Marist College .
Funding for SDUMC partially provided by NSF grant DMS-0536991 through the MAA Regional Undergraduate Mathematics Conferences program.
Spuyten Duyvil graphic by Kristen Buccanich Manhattan College '06
