Sessions are held on Saturdays, 10:00am-12:00pm followed by lunch in 161 Coburn Hall on UMass Lowell's campus.
Free parking is available at the Coburn Hall Parking Lot located on Wilder Street.
2023-2024 Season
April 27: Hide & Seek - Help @Cora_Cat find @Misha_Mouse, even though Cora, an online influencer, publishes her search strategy in advance to attract as many of @Micha_Mouse's followers as possible.
Session Facilitator: Steve Heller guides math circle style Math Explorations, integrating interactive games and puzzles to help budding mathematicians employ essential mathematical concepts in problem-solving. Steve also serves on the steering committee and as a facilitator for the JRMF Community Math Circle, which meets monthly online.
May 18 (tentative): To be announced!
Steve Heller
February 10 : A Game of Halves and Have-Nots. It's an easy game to define but difficult to determine a winning strategy. Join us as we explore the rules of the game, investigate strategies, and play with variations. This game was presented to us by Chrissi von Renesse during her presentation at our Mathematics Education Speaker Series.
Session Facilitator: Katie King is a full-time professor in the education department at UML. She works with elementary and secondary pre-service teachers, helping them reimagine what STEM teaching and learning can be.
Katie King
Previous Math Mill sessions have included:
Game Day at the Math Mill! Ken Levasseur facilitated a session looking at the game of SET. One lucky participant won a copy of the game to take home.
Who says math can't be beautiful? Daniel Glasscock led us through explorations into fractals. Folding strips of paper, we combined our efforts to create The Dragon
Daniel Glasscock and Katie King engaged us in solving geometric puzzles and designing our own. Plus, a lucky winner won a copy of Geometry Puzzles in Felt Tip by Catriona Agg (@CShearer41 on twitter)
Tom Heywosz led us through an investigation into living wages using online resources. Will a $15 minimum wage give anyone in the US a living wage?
Katie and Tom led us through an iteration of the Kitten Problem, looking at exponential growth and how assumptions can impact our mathematical modeling.
Dr. MJ Kim from UML's School of Education joined us as the team facilitated a session looking at mathematics-based children's literature!
We collaborated with UMass Lowell's UTeach program to support our aspiring mathematics educators in implementing projects for their Project-Based Instruction course. High school students from multiple area schools took a field trip to campus, got to tour our mathematics department, and then joined several members of the Math Mill to work on problems.
Ken led us through some investigations into using mathematics visualization in proofs.
Tom Heywosz first asked us to maximize and minimize the area of a triangle using some constraints, and then led a great discussion about how to use questions like this in the classroom.
Ken Levasseur introduced us to the game of SET and had us think about optimal strategies for playing the game.
Daniel Glasscock asked us to investigate the use of yes-no questions. Using various perspectives brought by each participant, we connected yes-no questions to Guess Who, pooled COVID testing, scratched CDs, and the binary system.
Katie King brought some of her favorite geometry puzzles from Catriona Shearer's twitter feed and challenged us to think about area, ratios, and triangles.
Brendan Kelly facilitated a session on modeling income inequality. Participants were asked to discuss what data are needed to measure income inequality. Conversation included wondering about the implications of quantifying inequities.
Katie King surprised us with an animal-awareness question about how quickly cats can reproduce. While we had several lingering mathematical questions, the overall answer is: Listen to Bob Barker, and spay or neuter your pets!
Libby Often and Tom Heywosz brought us a task adapted from the Association of Indigenous Math Circles looking at ranked choice voting. Is there a clear winner? We discussed a variety of models of selecting a winner, all of which gave us a different outcome!
Megan Staples and Kyle Evans asked us to think about how to model the spread of the pandemic, and got us thinking about how policy changes can impact how much spread is in the community.
Anna Ferrara and Roser Gine began with an innocent-seeming question about sequences of subsets that led us into the beautiful field of graph theory. We even encountered a real tesseract (and it didn't look anything like the one in the movies).
Stew Miller brought us real (anonymized) data from a school district. He challenged us to think about what makes a student "successful" and how the high school might work to support more students to be "successful."
Ken Levasseur facilitated a session on integer trains using Cuisenaire rods. Participants wondered about connections to Pascal's Triangle and thought through various ways to prove their findings.
