Schedule of lectures and activities

The summer school program contains the full schedule for both weeks, lecture abstracts, event descriptions, and summaries of the research projects.

We will have lectures and learning activities in Week 1, and research meetings in Week 2, every weekday from 9 am until 5 pm. Lectures will be held in room ART 114 of the Arts Building. Coffee breaks will be held in room ART 112.

Organized excursions

All of these "official" excursions are optional (we'll ask who's interested to get an idea of numbers and organize transportation).

• Free guided tour of the UBC Okanagan Gallery and Indigenous art on campus, Saturday July 8

  • meet at 9:50am at the FINA Gallery in the CCS building; tour will last 1 hour

• Hike at Knox Mountain, Sunday July 9

  • meet at 9:30am outside the Nechako building (where the check-in desk is); transportation has been arranged

• Swing dance beginner lesson in Stuart Park, Sunday July 9, 7–9pm

  • meet at 6:30pm outside the Skeena residence; transportation has been arranged; lesson will last 1/2 hour, followed by social dancing for 1 1/2 hours

We encourage participants to plan activities with one another; some suggestions are on our Resources page, and others are in this BIRS Guest Info file.

Announcements

All announcements and updates made during the summer school will be recorded here for your reference.

• Wednesday July 12, 8:45pm:

  • Tomorrow morning (Thursday July 13), we will all meet at 9am in the main lecture hall (ART 114) for some quick announcements.

  • At 3pm on Friday (July 14), we will all meet in the main hall and each research group will give a brief summary of their project and where they have gotten this week.

    • Please plan for your summary to be 7 minutes long (really! We have 10 groups to get through).

    • We recommend making a few Beamer slides (perhaps 4 slides) and emailing them to us before Friday afternoon. That way we can put them all on one computer so that we don't have to take time to change which computer is plugged in to the system.

• Wednesday July 12, 8:30pm: In-person participants were sent an email containing detailed instructions for how to get reimbursed for their IPENT-related expenses.

• Monday July 10, 10:30pm:

  • Just a quick summary of tomorrow's schedule (Tuesday July 11): almost the entire day will be spent either in our research groups/rooms or in the coffee/lunch room. But we will gather together at 3pm for the second EDI session, led again by Keira Gunn.

• Sunday July 9, 10:45pm:

  • We discovered another restaurant on the list that doesn't accept the UBC–O meal card: J's Cafe (in downtown Kelowna).

  • Remember our EDI homework, which we will use to start the discussion in this week's EDI session: "By Tuesday, write a 500+ word statement or equivalent presentation in another format to respond to the following question: 'What have you done, or what can you see yourself doing to make mathematics a more inclusive, diverse, and equitable field?'"

  • Tomorrow morning (Monday July 10) we will start the day by meeting all together in room ART 114 (our main lecture room for most of last week). We will then break out into research groups in several rooms (see below) for introductions to our projects.

  • After the coffee break, the IPENT poster session will take place in room ART 104. We encourage every IPENT participant to spend some time looking at the excellent posters and talking to their makers about the excellent mathematics on display. Think of the 10:30am–noon window as an extended period of reconnecting with IPENT folks, appreciating the posters and the hard work that went into them, and fuelling up for the week to come.

  • Here are the official rooms for the research groups. However, we encourage groups who are two-to-a-room to look around for other rooms in ART or nearby—most classrooms that seem empty should be fine for us to use (and we can pleasantly let ourselves be evicted if not).

    • Andrew Fiori's group: ART 102

    • Alia Hamieh's group: ART 114

    • Ghaith Hiary's group: ART 102

    • Habiba Kadiri's group: ART 110

    • Nathan Ng's group: ART 110

    • Olivier Ramaré's group: ART 104

    • Enrique Treviño's group: ART 219

    • Akshaa Vatwani's group: ART 202

    • Peng-Jie Wong's group: ART 103

    • Asif Zaman's group: ART 103

  • Finally, Habiba and Nathan have kindly provided all kinds of goodies in the 5th flour Skeena lounge—fruit, Bubly, and ice cream—free to any of us whenever we want!

• Friday July 7, 1:15pm:

  • The information for where we will meet for each excursion has been updated above. (There's no cost for any of these excursions.) We did have the signup sheets to get an idea of how much transportation to arrange for; but if a few people who signed up don't end up going, or a few people who didn't sign up end up going, that will be fine.

  • Chad Davis (the Site Director who greeted us on Monday) has send a PDF file with lots of additional suggestions for what to do in Kelowna in your free time; a link has been added above as well.

• Friday July 7, 11:45am:

  • We've heard from you that some of the restaurants on the list we received at check-in do not actually accept the UBC–O meal cards:

    • DunnEnzies

    • Grizzly Bear Bistro

(Some other places on the list find the UBC–O card confusing but do eventually accept it.) We're sorry about this misunderstanding! It's probably safest to ask the restaurants we visit whether they accept the UBC–O card before starting to order and dine.

• Thursday July 6, 10:15pm:

  • Please take a look at Andrew Fiori's learning activities (available at the Dropbox link) and especially make sure you'll be ready to use computational platforms that are relevant. For Andrew's learning activities, please have someone in your group join the Zoom link (like you did this morning) so that Andrew can come visit and offer support. I'll put you in the correct breakout room.

  • We have the Week 2 meal cards and will be handing them out during Akshaa's learning activities tomorrow morning. Remember that you can use both meal cards at any time during the two weeks. The Week 2 meal cards will only have $200 on them insteead of $220. But we have arranged for a fourth catered lunch next week to compensate—we'll have lunch in the coffee room Mon/Tue/Wed/Fri next week.

  • Monday's poster session will be in room ART 104.

  • If you ever want some COVID tests, you can get them for free at Paper & Supply Co, the print shop in the building just to the south of the Nechako front desk iIndeed they seemed eager to give the COVID tests away).

• Wednesday July 5, 11:00pm:

  • We have created new groups for the remaining learning activities on Thursday and Friday (July 6–7)—please check your email for the details.

  • We're going to try a variation on how we run the hybrid learning activities:

Tomorrow (Thursday) at 9am, please gather your newly assigned groups in your newly assigned rooms. We ask one person in each group to set up a device and log on to Zoom; Group N should join Breakout Room N.

We will assign the online participants to the breakout rooms and you will be able to interact with them that way. (Please arrange yourselves and the device so that the online participants can see the notes, whether that's on a whiteboard or with someone sharing their screen on Zoom, and make sure the audio setup allows them to hear and contribute to the discussion as well.) We hope this arrangement better combines the advantages of the in-person and online participants being able to interact with one another and the advantages of the in-person people communicating in the same physical space.

• Wednesday July 5, 8:45pm:

  • Here is the text of the homework from today's EDI session:

By Tuesday, write a 500+ word statement or equivalent presentation in another format to respond to the following question: "What have you done, or what can you see yourself doing to make mathematics a more inclusive, diverse, and equitable field?"

These statements will be used to start the discussion in the EDI session on Tuesday, July 11.

• • On the subject of meal cards, we will be obtaining and distributing the Week 2 meal cards in the next couple of days. Both your meal cards will be valid throughout the two weeks (the Week 1 meal card will not expire). Please save both meal cards and return them to us or to the Front Desk at the end of Week 2.

• Wednesday July 5, 11:15am: You might have seen the laundry room on the first floor of Skeena, which your room key should open at any time. Two helpful details about laundry:

  • You can go to the Front Desk (in the Nechako building, where you checked in) and ask them for a laundry card. You'll still have to put money on the card to use it, but at least you won't have to pay $5 for the empty card itself.

  • Starting tonight, we will leave some detergent in the laundry room that you are free to use.

• Wednesday July 5, 8:15am: Some of the IPENT participants have made a WhatsApp group to help coordinate various activities (like board games, outdoor activities, and other sports). So if anyone is planning something for the evening, they can just post the time and venue on this group (the link was sent by email to in-person attendees) and gather other interested participants.

• Tuesday July 4, 10:30pm:

  • We will be taking a conference photo at noon on Thursday (July 6), at the conclusion of Asif Zaman's first lecture.

    •  Participants in Kelowna should gather in the ART building atrium (where we did the number line icebreaker).

    • For online participants, we will take a screenshot on Zoom—we encourage you to turn on your video for it!

  • Peng-Jie's learning activities tomorrow morning (Wednesday July 5, 11am–noon) will be in person, instead of hybrid as listed in the program. Please meet in the same groups and rooms as you did for today's in-person learning activities.

  • As a reminder, please indicate your interest in the weekend excursions on the signup sheets in the coffee room, by 5pm tomorrow (Wednesday).

  • We've learned that the UBC–O bookstore (down the hall from the cafeteria) gives a 15% discount on clothing to conference participants—just have your nametag with you!

• Monday July 3, 10:30pm:

  • Starting tomorrow there will be pronoun stickers—she/her, he/him, they/them, etc.—in the coffee room (ART 112); we encourage you to select your sticker of choice and add it to your name tag.

  • Also in the coffee room, we will set out a collection of EDI books that you are welcome to browse or borrow during the summer school.

  • Also in the coffee room, we will set out sign-up sheets for the three "official" excursions this coming weekend, to gauge how many people are interested in them so that we can see what transportation options we can organize. Please make your best guess as to whether you want to attend any or all of the art tour, hike, and swing dance lesson, and write your names on the sign-up sheet(s) by 5pm on Wednesday (July 5).

  • For hybrid learning activities tomorrow, Tuesday July 4 (1–2:30pm), please spread out and log on to Zoom like we did for the hybrid icebreaker today (no need to start in the main lecture hall).

  • For the two other sets of learning activities on Tuesday July 4 (11am–noon and 4–5pm), please form the same small groups in (mostly) the same locations that you did today. (We plan on creating new learning-activity groups for Thursday and Friday, after you get more chances to work with your current groups.)

• Monday July 3, 7:45pm:

  • The full puzzle from today's icebreakers was: “The decimal expansions of the numbers e and π have the same digit 9 in their 12th decimal place. Where is the first place that they have the same digits in three consecutive decimal places?”

  • The answer is that e and π both have the digits 996 in the 459th through 461st decimal places.

• Monday July 3, 12:15pm (updating an earlier 9am announcement):

  • ART 114 will be our main lecture room. Other classrooms we are using during this summer school are ART 103, 104, 106, 110, 202, and 219, as well as the coffee room ART 112.

  • In-person participants are welcome to use any of those rooms when logging on to Zoom (or public spaces as well). For the activities where we will all be on Zoom together with the online participants, we do encourage people to spread out physically and to use headphones, to minimize noise bleeding into people's Zoom connections.

  • When we are sitting together doing group activities, I really encourage people to move the chairs around so that you are sitting as a regular polygon! This sounds silly, but it's so easy for individuals to be excluded simply by being farther from the centroid of the group.

  • One of the priorities of this summer school is inclusivity, and one way we can embrace inclusivity is to make sure that everybody in your group is getting an equal opportunity to contribute. Of course there will be moments when one person has the floor with their ideas; but if you notice somebody (including yourself) not speaking much, please encourage them to join in; and if you notice somebody (including yourself) doing a lot of the talking, please encourage them to bring others into the conversation.

  • Regarding the meal cards, my understanding is that your current cards have $300 loaded on them for the first part of the summer school; on Friday (July 7) BIRS will provide us with an additional $220 meal card. BIRS is also providing lunches both weeks on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (held in the coffee room, ART 114). The meal cards can be used for the other days' lunches as well as breakfasts and dinners.

  • Finally, if you want me to take care of printing your poster for you, please send me the PDF file by tomorrow, Tuesday July 4 (or at least contact me so we can make a plan). Please refer to Nathan's earlier email for more details.