2018 - 2019 Events

Prelim Bee!

Every year, the AMS Student Chapter runs the Prelim Bee!, a fun, low-stakes way for first and second year grad students to practice for their prelims and for older grad students to make absolute fools of themselves. Contestants compete in teams of 1 to 4 to solve jeopardy-style mock prelim problems and win prizes. The 2019 Prelim Bee was held on April 5th and was sponsored by a grant from the Student Unions & Activities Grants Initiative.

Previous year's Prelim Bee! winners include:

2018 - Team ELMO: Montie Avery, Olivia Cannon, Emily Tibor, & Lucy Yang

MNIC Games Fair:

In a joint effort with the SIAM Student Chapter, the AMS organized a "Games Fair" at a local charter high school to show how fun math can be and to highlight a range of mathematicians. We also wanted to encourage students to pursue studies and careers in math or math-adjacent fields. To this end, we designed five game/puzzle stations for the students to play at, each of which introduces some bit of mathematics that they were unlikely to see in their high school curriculum:

  1. Knot Theory through untangling knots to find equivalencies

  2. Modular Arithmetic through a game similar to Nim

  3. Code Breaking through cyphers

  4. Algorithms/Logic through the puzzle "Towers of Hanoi"

  5. Geometry through the game SET


Pi Day Party:

What do mathematicians like even more than π? Pie! This Pi Day 2019, we brought the department together to eat pie in honor of that most circular of numbers. With an astounding number of entries to our homebaked pie competition, we awarded 3 prizes (ie bragging rights and sway in choice of snacks for tea):

  • Best in Show: Sally Jankovic and her Key Lime Pie (chosen by popular vote)

  • Prettiest Pie: Sally Jankovic and her Key Lime Pie (chosen by the AMS officers)

  • Most Mathematical Pie: Lilly Webster and her Apple Pie (chosen by the AMS officers)

Best in Show/Prettiest Pie

Most Mathematical Pie

The Bakers

Grading Party:

For finals grading in Fall 2018 the AMS provided bagels, coffee, and commiseration for all the grad students grading in Vincent Hall on a sleepy Saturday morning. The coffee wasn't great, but the bagels and company were, and we're pretty sure everyone on the 5th floor stopped by at some point or other.

Margin of Terror: a Halloween Movie Night:

For Halloween 2018, we held a movie night in Vincent 16 to watch "Fermat's Room," a campy movie best described as a "Spanish math thriller." The premise: mathematicians are summoned to a remote location and forced to solve math puzzles for their lives. It was just as absurd and wonderful as it sounds, and we loved it.