Department with Strong Showing at JMM

Department with Strong Showing at JMM  Seven faculty members and two students represented the Grinnell Mathematics and Statistics Department at this year's Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston, January 4-7, 2012. The Joint Mathematics Meeting is an annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). It is the "Largest annual mathematics meeting in the world" and had over 7000 attendees this year.  Alice Nadeau '13 and Bingxi Wu '13 presented the poster Multiplicative Partitions during the MAA Undergraduate Poster Session. This poster announced the results of their summer research (joint with Colin Johnson '13) during a MAP directed by Prof. Chamberland. The group found new results concerning the combinatorial structure of a multiplicative partition function, developed and implemented a fast algorithm for computing multiplicative partitions, and found exact evaluations of the corresponding generating function. This information gave new results related to the Riemann zeta function.  Marc Chamberland presented A Course in Experimental Mathematics during the MAA Session on the Capstone Course.  Shonda Kuiper presented her work on using games to teach statistics in two formats. First, in the MAA Session on Innovations in Teaching Statistics in the New Decade she gave the talk Playing games with a purpose. Also, in the MAA Poster Session on Projects Supported by the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education she and her collaborators presented the poster Playing Games with a Purpose: A New Approach to Teaching and Learning Statistics.  Jennifer Paulhus co-organized a three part AMS Special Session on Arithmetic Geometry consisting of 18 speakers. During this special session, Paulhus presented her own research in the talk Decomposing Jacobian Varieties of Curves.  Also in attendance were Professors Chris French, Joe Mileti, Emily Moore, and Tom Moore.