Prizes at Majors’ Banquet

At a record crowd of 150 majors and faculty at the Faculty House, Prof. Morgan and others announced the following awards:   Kozelka Prize in statistics: Bryan Jones and Kelly Kung   (awarded by Prof. De Veaux, Associate Chair for Statistics) Morgan Prize in applied mathematics:… Continue reading »

I am Math/Stat

As officers of the AWM, we started the “I am Math/Stat” project as a visual representation of the diversity of experience of students in Math/Stat. We’ve put up posters in Bronfman, both at the top of the stairs and in the Math/Stat Bronfman Library. We hope to… Continue reading »

Fleming Essay on Harris Wins Award

Sarah Fleming ’17 has won Honorable Mention in the Association for Women in Mathematics Essay Contest, writing about our new Assistant Professor Pamela Harris: An Unconventional Path by Sarah Fleming ’17 For most of her life, Pam Harris had no plans to become a… Continue reading »

The Banach-Mazur Game by John Damstra

This spring, I presented my senior colloquium on a topological game called the Banach-Mazur Game. This game was formulated by Stanislaw Mazur in 1935. It is the earliest example of an infinite game with perfect information. The game proceeds as follows. Continue reading. . John Damstra is a… Continue reading »

Sphere Packing in Dimensions 8 and 24

In a remarkable new paper, Maryna Viazovska has put forth a proof of a most efficient way to pack unit spheres in dimension 8. In a follow-up paper, Henry Cohn, Abhinav Kumar, Stephen D. Miller, Danylo Radchenko, and Viazovska have a similar result in dimension 24. Continue reading »

Hello from Montenegro

by Nela (Vukmirović) Milošević ’08 I am writing from my homeland Montenegro, a small country in the Balkans, and in this post I just wanted to give a perspective from someone who now lives far away from Williams. I am class of 2008, and I decided to go… Continue reading »

FrankFest 2016

Williams College hosted a conference on the occasion of Frank Morgan’s retirement from Williams College. The conference webpage is: web.williams.edu/Mathematics/csilva/FrankFest-2016.html… Continue reading »

“The Magic of Math” by Art Benjamin

by Gabriel Ngwe ’17 “The Magic of Math” is a book on general mathematics which aims to reveal the underlying magic. What lies behind “The Magic of Math” is the same thing that lies behind magic in general: manipulation and redirection. These themes underlie the book, and Arthur… Continue reading »

Egyptian Fractions

by Nam Nguyen ‘19 Numbers and basic computation appeared in Ancient Egypt as early as 2700 BCE. But you might not know that Ancient Egyptians demanded that every fraction have 1 in the numerator. They wanted to write any rational between 0 and 1 as a sum of such “unit”… Continue reading »

Interview with Mia Smith ’16

by Nam Nguyen ’19 Smith tells Nguyen about her experience as a math major in Williams College   When did you discover your passion for mathematics? At 3 or 4 years old, I was captivated by the Traffic Jam Puzzle… Continue reading »