Sessions are held on Saturdays, 10:00am-11:30pm followed by pizza and networking in 161 Coburn Hall on UMass Lowell's campus.
Free parking is available at the Coburn Hall Parking Lot located on Wilder Street.
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2024-2025
A Season of Interweaving Mathematics and Humanity
September 28: Quixx - Join us in learning the game of Quixx, a simple dice game played with six 6-sided dice. We'll explore optimal win strategies and alternative rules..
Session Facilitators: Dr. Katie King is an assistant teaching 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. Dr. Yanfen Li is an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department at UML. She researches how to diversify the STEM teaching force. Both Katie and Yanfen are avid gamers and came across Quixx at GenCon in Indianapolis.
Katie King
Yanfen Li
October 26: Charty Party - Explore the math version of Apples to Apples with us!
Session Facilitators: Dr. Carly Briggs is an assistant teaching professor in the math department at UML. Her teaching focus is on problem-based learning and collaboration in the class. Tom Heywosz is a mathematics teacher at Lowell High School in the Freshman Academy. He works with students in a variety of math courses and is always encouraging them to think and talk about mathematics.
November 23 : Even Quads, SET, Rubik's Cube, and Comets - A plethora of games will be played and investigated as we look at ideas involving set theory
Session Facilitator: Dr. Ken Levasseur is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He enjoys working with data visualization and playing with math ideas.
Previous Math Mill sessions have included:
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.
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