Inspirations

The Girls’ Angle Support Network is a crucial component of Girls’ Angle’s math educational strategy. The Support Network consists of professional women who use math in their work in some vital way and have agreed to visit the club to show our members how and for what they use math.  Each visitor provides yet another reason to study math and a role model. Over 30 such women have visited so far and it has been a dream of ours to create a video series that features these extraordinary women.

Thanks to Jan Rimmel and the AboutFace Media team, people from all over can now meet Girls’ Angle Support Network member and Advisor Dr. Elissa Ozanne, a Decision Scientist who works at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the UCSF Medical Center. It’s hard to think of a more vital application of mathematics than hers.

We hope to raise additional funding so that we can produce more such videos. You can help!

Back to Basics: Arctangent

Recently, a student asked me about problem #8 on the 2008 AIME 1 competition, which is reproduced here for your convenience:

Find the positive integer such that

.

She was able to solve this using the sum of arctangents identity

but was wondering if there was another way less algebraically involved.  Also, what do you do if you can’t recall this identity?

Girls’ Angle Bulletin, Volume 5, Number 2

The latest issue of the Girls’ Angle Bulletin is now available.

This issue kicks off with the concluding half of Winding Numbers by Stanford professor Søren Galatius.  The cover design is inspired by his article…the drawing is one long loop with seven-fold symmetry. Points with the same winding number are painted the same color. The central highlight consists of points where the winding number is 4.

Palindrome Madness: Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012!

Maybe it’s because I’m in the midst of writing hundreds of problems for SUMiT 2012 that I feel like I’m seeing palindromic numbers everywhere! (Even in the date: 12/21…)

For those of us born in or before 1991, we’ve lived through two palindromic years: 1991 and 2002, and there won’t be another palindromic year for another century.

But did you ever happen to notice that if you take 2011, which isn’t a palindrome, and multiply it by its reversal, 1102, you get a palindrome? .

Random Ramblings

With the next issue of the Bulletin, the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meeting, and SUMiT 2012 on the horizon, I haven’t had much time to blog.

But I wanted to mention a few things that caught my attention these last couple weeks.

SUMiT 2012

Today, the US math educational landscape is speckled over with math competitions. There are so many, in fact, that one might get the impression that advanced mathematics is a competition. Even in competitions that have a team component, the teams still compete against each other. Yet so much math is actually accomplished today through collaboration. So for years I wanted to create some kind of math intense event that was just as compelling as the math competition but without the competitive, ranking aspect.

A Blind Spot of the MCAS

I’d like to blog about an important problem solving skill: The ability to make new symbolic representations. Fundamentally, it’s a language skill. Languages are symbolic representations, and where would the human race be without language?