## Girls’ Angle Bulletin, Volume 13, Number 6

We close up Volume 13 with an interview with Middlesex Community College Associate Professor of Mathematics Aisha Arroyo. We frequently meet girls who like math but are not interested in math competitions. However, there certainly are girls who enjoy math competitions, and Prof. Arroyo was one of them in her student years. Today, she is actively involved in college-level math education.

The Summer Fun Solutions take up most of this issue, but we do squeeze in a Meditate to the Math on barycentric coordinates. Always try to understand the mathematical facts that you encounter. Don’t settle for memorizing them. The point of Meditate to the Math is exactly to approach mathematics through conceptual understanding.

The Summer Fun Solutions are quite detailed this year, and I’d like to thank Jasmine Zou and Matthew de Courcy-Ireland for their complete solutions that explain a lot of math in the process. For example, how quickly can you compute, with paper and pencil, the sum of the first 1,000 perfect 10th powers? Matthew shows us the way in complete detail.

These solutions also make heavy use of the Pell equation $x^2 - 2y^2 = \pm 1$, and its integer solutions are covered in quite a bit of depth.

We hope you enjoy it!

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!

Also, the Girls’ Angle Bulletin is a venue for students who wish to showcase their mathematical achievements that go above and beyond the curriculum. If you’re a student and have discovered something nifty in math, considering submitting it to the Bulletin.

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!