Education
Colloquium and Community
This entry is written by Nico Aiello ’09 on behalf of SMASAB 2009. At Williams, every senior math/stats major has to give a colloquium talk. If you had asked me on the morning of my colloquium how I felt about the colloquium requirement, it’s possible I would have told you it was the worst thing
The Putnam and Other Math Competitions
In honor of the strong performance by Williams College on the Putnam Math Competition (placing 14th out of over 500 teams, with two students in the top 200 and two in the top 500 in North America), this is a good time to talk about why these competitions are worth doing. There are many reasons
Math is Music
Almost 30 years ago, something happened that made introductory statistics harder to teach. Students didn’t suddenly become less teachable, nor did professors forget their craft. It was that we began to switch from teaching statistics as a mathematics course to teaching the art and craft of statistics as its own discipline. When statistics was viewed as
Art – Sol LeWitt – Math
This past week marks the rising of the Sol LeWitt sun in my part of the world. At the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), a beautiful new exhibition on The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt has just opened, exploring the underlying grammar of his art and ideas. Moreover, a major collaboration opened at the Massachusetts
Dada Math
Math departments are full of smart people. But with the demands (and joys) of research and teaching (and of our personal lives), most people in math departments do not talk to each other about math nearly enough. Certainly that is true at Williams. We do have a fairly vibrant math community here. There are talks
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