Math Mondays

Our first Math Monday of the new year is set for September 2. Please join us for a Math Nature Walk, which will start at 3:10 p.m. Plan to meet at the outside doors to Hayes Hall. We will leave shortly after 3:10.

A drink station will be available before the walk, but you are encouraged to bring your own water bottles. This is your chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones as we say hello to all our fellow math and stats faculty and students. We hope to see you there!

Meet and greet with your fellow math/stat students and the math and statistics faculty at this year's First-Year Welcome Tea. Say hello to our math community and hear about all the exciting news in math and statistics. Learn about exciting opportunities and our Math Monday series.

Join us on the Peirce Patio (weather permitting) at 3:10 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 9. We will be offering a variety of snacks with lemonade and iced tea. Celebrate another year of mathematics and statistics here at Kenyon. We hope to see you there!

Every summer, many of our students participate in the summer research program. Students work as full participants in the processes of creating a research plan, executing a research project, and preparing results for presentation in a public forum. Learn more about the research done by your fellow mathematics and statistics students. 

This week's panelists include several students who worked both on and off campus for their research.

Jimmy Baker '26 worked with Professor Holdener this summer through the Kenyon Summer Science Scholars program on the abundance index and triperfect numbers, a topic within number theory.

Kyle Kelley '25 engaged in a remote research experience through Virginia Commonwealth University researching how polynomials of graphs represent themselves in respective Lie algebras.

Christophe Leblanc '25 worked with Professor Snipes this summer through the Kenyon Summer Science Scholars program on the Lavrentiev Phenomenon, which is a problem in the calculus of variation.

Lief Schaumann '25 was a part of the REU Program at Moravian University where he worked with several other participants on a topic in number theory known as integer covering systems.

Join us on Monday, Sept. 16, at 3:10 p.m. in Hayes Hall 109 to hear these exciting presentations and perhaps learn how you too can get involved in summer research programs. We hope to see you there!

Every summer, many of our students participate in the summer research program. Students work as full participants in the processes of creating a research plan, executing a research project, and preparing results for presentation in a public forum. Learn more about the research done by your fellow mathematics and statistics students. 

This week's panelists include some of our sophomores and juniors and their studies over the summer.

Wisdom Akanwe ‘27 worked as a data analytics intern and business consultant at Impact Academy in Tulsa. Wisdom’s group was tasked with proposing a viable business plan for Circle Cinema (the first arthouse Cinema in Tulsa) to expand its audience to Hispanic and Black communities.

Moe Belgith ‘26 and Godwin Idowu ‘27 worked with Professor Aydin through the Kenyon Summer Science Scholars Program.

Peter Dunson ‘27 worked through the BDSI at the University of Michigan, using Bayesian clustering to find meaningful subgroups of ICU-admitted heart failure patients.

Join us on Monday, Sept. 23, at 3:10 p.m. in Tomsich 101 (note the new location this week) to hear these exciting presentations and perhaps learn how you too can get involved in summer research programs. We hope to see you there!

Noah Aydin, professor of mathematics, and Marissa Gee, assistant professor of mathematics, will present a double feature of mathematics research for Math Monday, sharing more information on their work and its impact in the greater mathematical community.

Aydin will give a brief introduction to coding theory and talk about the ongoing undergraduate research program at Kenyon and how you might get involved.

Gee will speak on work involving optimal control questions. Mathematical models are powerful tools for predicting the world — given some input, they can tell us about likely outcomes. In some scenarios, there are parameters in the model that we can control, like the rate of fishing when modeling a commercial fishery, or the direction of motion when modeling an autonomous vehicle. Optimal control is the study of how we can choose the parameters that will give us the "best" outcome, like maximizing profit or minimizing cost, based on a particular model. Gee's research uses techniques from math modeling, differential equations, and numerical methods to answer optimal control questions like how a rover can safely navigate the terrain on Mars, or how an animal can find food while avoiding being eaten by a predator.

Join us on Monday, Sept. 30, at 3:10 p.m. in Tomsich 101 (note the new location this week) to hear these exciting presentations and perhaps learn how you too can get involved in mathematics and statistics research hear at Kenyon. We hope to see you there!

Get ready for some fun activities using modeling as we welcome founder and director of the Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations and Opportunities with Differential Equations (SIMIODE), Brian Winkel. We will engage in active modeling of birth and immigration for a population of M&M's (yummy) and collect data from a video on time and height of a falling column of water, with some elementary science development of a reasonable model. Further, we will demonstrate models involving other phenomena (e.g., change in size of a shopping mall due to high speed highway access) and some with efforts to explain collected data from various courses in mathematics. We have found over years of teaching undergraduate mathematics that real world modeling engages students AND faculty, thus we look forward to sharing with attendees.

After completing his Ph.D. in Ring Theory in in 1971, Brian Winkel's first teaching position was at a small liberal arts college, Albion. Drawn by the many applications of mathematics he turned his mathematical life to teaching mathematics through applications and modeling. Along the way he founded and edited several journals, among them Cryptologia and PRIMUS, the former about all aspects of cryptology and the latter about teaching undergraduate mathematics. Both journals are offered by the Mathematical Association of America freely through the their member portal. Winkel has taught at a number of different  schools: liberal arts colleges, research 1 universities, engineering institutes and the military academy. In 2011 he founded and directs SIMIODE, Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations and Opportunities with Differential Equations, where one can find hundreds of modeling scenarios for teaching and learning differential equations in a modeling-first approach.

Join us on Monday, Oct. 7, in Hayes Hall 109 for this fun and exciting presentation. We hope to see you there!

Alumni from across the country and students here on campus are invited to join this virtual talk, which is one of six faculty talks organized to celebrate Kenyon’s bicentennial. Professor of Mathematics Judy Holdener will deliver the October lecture on the history of her department, and she will be joined by three alumni who will share the nature of their work spanning theoretical mathematics, applied mathematics and statistics — the three tracks within Kenyon’s mathematics major. 

The presenting alumni are:

Christine Breiner ’99, associate professor of mathematics, Brown University

Alton Barbehenn ’17, data scientist, University of California at San Francisco

Katerina Tang ‘21, research assistant, Cornell University

Attendees can register for the event at: kenyon.edu/events/mathematics-at-kenyon/2024-10-15.

Every summer, many of our students participate in the summer research program. Students work as full participants in the processes of creating a research plan, executing a research project, and preparing results for presentation in a public forum. Learn more about the research done by your fellow mathematics and statistics students. 

This week's panelists include two more students in our Mathematics & Statistics program.

Cael Elmore '25 did research at the Florida Summer Institute in Biostatistics and Data Science where he followed up on high rates of type 2 diabetes that emerged in the Marshall Islands after the United State's nuclear testing program (1950s) disrupted native agriculture on the islands. The research, conducted with researchers at the University of Arkansas, Florida International University, and Florida Atlantic University, suggested a culturally sensitive diabetes self-management education program as an alternative to the current standard of care, with promising results for the future.

Andrew Mayer '26 worked with Professor Leatherman and Alexander Powell '18 as Kenyon Summer Science Scholars to closely examine the effect of age on specific basketball skills. They took a primarily Bayesian approach while also integrating machine learning and nonparametric methods. Powell, who has worked in the NBA since graduating from Kenyon, provided proprietary data which was used to conduct the analyses.

Join us on Monday, Oct. 21, at 3:10 p.m. in Hayes 109 to hear these exciting presentations and perhaps learn how you too can get involved in summer research programs. We hope to see you there!

Sundials measure the passage of time by keeping track of the movement of the shadow of a stick (called the gnomon). These analog timepieces have been around for millennia, the earliest known being sundials in Ancient Egypt dating back to about 1500 BC. In this talk we will introduce a digital sundial, whose shadows spell out the time in numerals. After demonstrating the device, we will explore the theory of digital sundials in the context of projection mappings. We encounter cool art, fractals and geometric series along the way.

Join us on Monday, Oct. 28, at 3:10 p.m. in Hayes 109 to hear this exciting presentation from Associate Professor of Mathematics Marie Snipes. We hope to see you there!

Looking for a break from all the homework and exams? This week’s Math Monday is a relaxing breather from course work and a thank you for attending our Math Monday sessions this fall. Free snacks and drinks provided by AVI Dining Services will be available at the door. Join us on Monday, November 18, at 3:10 p.m. in Hayes 109 for all the fun. We hope to see you there!

This semester, our seniors majoring in mathematics and statistics pursued independent research projects on a topic of interest. The research topics spanned a wide range. These students will present their work at a poster session this week to share their work with the wider Kenyon community. Come support your fellow math and stat students!

The poster session will be held in Peirce Hall in the Alumni Dining Room from 11:10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Tuesday, December 3. We hope to see you there!