Girls’ Angle Bulletin, Volume 9, Number 2

Volume 9, Number 2 begins with the first half of an interview with French mathematician Alice Guionnet. Prof. Guionnet is a professor of mathematics at MIT and an expert on random matrices.

In addition to the interview, there are 2 more articles in this issue that pertain to probability and statistics. One is the concluding half of Prof. Elizabeth Meckes articles on the laws of probability.  This time, she pulls up the curtain on the central limit theorem. The other is this issue’s Math In Your World, which describes an activity led by Girls’ Angle Support Network visitor Jinger Zhao. Jinger is a financial modeler who works at TwoSigma, a hedge fund based in New York City. At the club, Jinger uses statistics to model the connection between wingspan and height.

Anna continues her investigation of irreducible polynomials over the finite field with 2 elements. In this installment, she works out the roots of all the irreducible polynomials of degrees 4 and 5. Anna’s entire investigation traces back to an exercise suggested by Prof. Judy Walker in her interview from Volume 8, Number 6. Do you think you can see where Anna might be headed? If you do, follow your thoughts and see where they lead. You’re invited to tell us about it; we’d love to hear from you. If you’re falling in love with polynomials over $F_2$, check out this proposal for a new PolyMath project and the comments that follow.

Multiplication and exponentials are fundamental concepts in mathematics. For anyone working on learning these concepts, we hope Addie Summer’s Thoughts on Multiplication and our Learn by Doing on exponentials will be of use. The cover, which was created using MATLAB by MathWorks, honors multiplication.

Emily and Jasmine continue their quest for “nice” triangles. This time, they explore integer-sided triangles that have a 120 degree angle and establish a beautiful bridge between these and integer-sided triangles with a 60 degree angle.

We conclude with some notes from the club. If you’re a girl, aged roughly 10-18 in the Greater Boston Area, you’re welcome to join. Our next session begins January 28, 2016.

We hope you enjoy the Bulletin!

Finally, a reminder: when you subscribe to the Girls’ Angle Bulletin, you’re not just getting a subscription to a magazine. You are also gaining access to the Girls’ Angle mentors.  We urge all subscribers and members to write us with your math questions or anything else in the Bulletin or having to do with mathematics in general. We will respond. We want you to get active and do mathematics. Parts of the Bulletin are written to induce you to wonder and respond with more questions. Don’t let those questions fade away and become forgotten. Send them to us!

We continue to encourage people to subscribe to our print version, so we have removed some content from the electronic version.  Subscriptions are a great way to support Girls’ Angle while getting something concrete back in return.  We hope you subscribe!