Our research symposium is a wrap! Last Saturday 130 students attended the latest annual QED, and the consensus was that this was our most outstanding symposium to date!
Check out our photographs in the post below to get of a sense of what a special day it was! There are lots of thanks to go around:
- Lawrence Tanzman, MC2 Board Member, and senior Jason Chen, QED participant(!) ran our annual Guesstimathon. (For those not in the know, the Guesstimathon asks participants to guess a range of values for certain fun facts–highlights from this year included, “The number of people who watched all episodes of ‘Stranger Things 2’ within 24 hours of its release,” and, “The number of tweets President Donald Trump has made on his account as of December 1st, 2017.” No technology allowed to help guess the answers, of course!)
- UIC’s Daniel Groves gave our keynote address, focusing on geometry, starting in the plane and ending up on the sphere, giving a flavor of what non-Euclidean geometry is for the novice.
- Our 32 judges hailed from across the mathematical spectrum:
- Postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students from UIC, UChicago, and DePaul–Ben Usha, Tim Black, Maxime Bergeron, Janet Page, Samuel Dodds, Mariya Sardarli, and Nathan Lopez, along with professor Lynn Narasimhan.
- Community members with math and science backgrounds–John Brown, Hal Finkel, Nate Harman, Peyton Morgan, Jerry Winn, Jim Mallernee, Kelly Hally (math circle parent!), Rob Creel, Oren Livne, Peter Morfe, Zach Fogelson, Nolan Winkler, Jesse Wang, and Lucie Weng.
- Middle and high school teachers–Joe Ochiltree, Rutha Dixon, Matt Rosenberg, Serg Cvetkovic, Stu Abram, Aimee Hart, Alison Ridgway, Mike Calderbank, along with PJ Karafiol, who is now a principal but is still a math teacher at heart!
- Our sponsors: Dell, which gave out drones(!) to some of our high school participants; Wolfram, which shared many prizes and is providing free access to Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha to every student who had a project in QED; the American Mathematical Society, which donated over $2,000 in books to give away; and Citadel, which paid for tshirts, pizza, and some truly excellent ear muffs along with other gifts. Moreover, several Citadel employees helped judge QED projects!
- A special thanks to Benjamin Walker who took most of the photos in our montage below.
- The folks behind the scenes who organized the judging and kept the event running smoothly–Julienne Au, Matt Moran, Mike Caines, Dan Kang, and Scott Galson.
- Finally, thanks to all of the teachers who supported these students create such outstanding projects. 🙂
QED 2018 will be held on Saturday, December 1st. Get those projects started now!