Students' Column

“A poster session – outdoors?!”

Here in the Southern California-Nevada Section of the MAA we think nothing of scheduling our spring Student Poster Session for an outdoor venue, much to the amazement of a judge visiting from Ohio. While a fine mist did close out the hour-long session, it did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the student presenters, judges, and other participants. Numbers were up slightly for the Spring ’09 edition, with 26 students teaming up to present 19 posters – some accompanied by physical models or interactive computer programs. The level of accomplishment was quite high, and seven posters were determined by the judges to be exceptionally distinguished; these won Meritorious Poster Awards. (See the list at the end of this column.) As always, the poster session relied upon the efforts of many dedicated organizers, judges, and faculty mentors: all are heartily thanked. (Thanks also to Ernie Solheid for photos of the 2009 Spring Meeting!)

Meritorious Poster Award winners Felix Ortiz and Eduardo Calles of Bakersfield College present their project “Bridge of Success” at the 2009 Spring Section Meeting at Cal Lutheran.

Consider a Conference

Many student members of our section of the MAA made a trip to Portland for MathFest in August. Students presented the results of their research projects and participated in or observed a variety of sessions. This year, a multitude of conferences appropriate for students are in the works. The Fall Meeting and Spring Meeting of our MAA section provide great introductions to conference-going, as each are relatively inexpensive one-day affairs, with programs guaranteed to educate and entertain. Gather a group from your school and attend! (This newsletter has all the news about the Fall Meeting; the Spring Meeting – April 10, 2010, at Harvey Mudd College – will be featured in the winter newsletter.) See the following list for other conferences to consider.

• October 17, 2009: Fall Meeting of the So Cal-NV Section of the MAA, CSU San Bernardino (Meeting website)
• November 21, 2009: Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Research (SCCUR), CSU Dominguez Hills (www.sccur.org)
• January 13 - 16, 2010: The Joint Mathematics Meetings, San Francisco, CA (www.ams.org/amsmtgs/2124_intro.html)
• March 13, 2010: Pacific Coast Undergraduate Math Conference, Pepperdine University, (www.pcumc-math.org)
• April 10, 2010: Spring Meeting of the So Cal-NV Section of the MAA, Harvey Mudd College in Claremont (http://www.maa.org/socal)

Other ways to enhance your education (and your career or grad school prospects)

Meetings and seminars, extra-curricular mathematics projects, the Putnam Exam and the Mathematical Modeling Competition, summer research opportunities, mathematicsrelated internships: these are just a few of the ways you can broaden your thinking, put your classroom learning to use in new situations, enhance your resume, and learn new mathematics. Talk to more experienced students, recent graduates, and your professors, and look for information on the web, at your school’s Career Center, and anywhere you can find it. Online, start with http://www.maa.org/students/reustuff/pages/REU.html for paid summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs), http://www.maa.org/students/career.html for lots of career information, and http://www.maa.org/awards/putnam.html to learn about the Putnam Exam.

Jennifer Bonsangue of CSU Channel Islands answers questions about her poster, “Mathematics and Forgery Analysis: The Dutch GoldenAge,” for which she received a Meritorious Poster Award at the 2009 Spring Section Meeting at Cal Lutheran.

Student Poster Sessions: San Francisco (January) and Claremont (April)

Join 6000 mathematicians at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) … and share your research project by participating in the national Student Poster Session. (To enter see www.maa.org/students/undergrad/jmmposterindex.html Deadline is Nov. 6, 2009.) The JMM also includes technical research presentations, survey talks, poster sessions, movie showings and musical performances, and much more. Information on all student activities will be posted in September at www.ams.org/amsmtgs/2124_intro.html.

Your research project isn’t quite ready to submit now? Enter it in the section’s Student Poster Session! You’re just thinking about starting something? That’s fine – you have until April 5 to enter. The So Cal-NV MAA section’s Spring Meeting will be held on April 10, 2010, at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont. Detailed information and abstract submission information will be in the February section newsletter. But start planning now: your poster could feature the results of any individual or group mathematics project. Need ideas? See below, and ask a professor.

• Results of honors, senior, or independent study projects;
• Results of classroom projects or modeling contests;
• Results of REUs or other summer research programs;
• Historical investigations in pure or applied mathematics;
• Solutions of problems from the Putnam Exam or from the Monthly or other journals.

Student Poster Session Organizer Cindy Wyels announces the award winners at the Spring 2009 MAA Section Meeting at Cal Lutheran.

Spring 2009 Meritorious Poster Awardees

• Eduardo Calles and Felix Ortiz, Bridge of Success, Bakersfield College, Advisor: Rebecca Head

• Jennifer Bonsangue, Mathematics and Forgery Analysis: The Dutch Golden Age, CSU Channel Islands. Advisor: Ivona Grzegorczyk
• Sonia Chauhan, Bipartite at its Best!!!, Cal Poly Pomona. Advisor: Berit Givens
• Benjamin Fogelson, Survival and proliferation of chronic lymphocytic leukemia in lymphoid tissue, Harvey Mudd College. Advisor: Lisette dePillis
• Aileen Gaudinez, Lisa Brown, Michelle Creek, Derivatives and Gradients as Tools in Digital Image Processing, Chapman University. Advisor: Mohamed Allali
• Kristina Klug, Rank Analysis of NASCAR, California Lutheran University. Advisor: Chris Brown
• Sarah Lauff, Institutional Research – Freshmen Retention and Cafeteria Patterns, Point Loma Nazarene University. Advisors: Greg Crow and Maria Zack
• Alana Nichol, PLNU Student Entry, Exit, and Reentry Points, Point Loma Nazarene University. Advisors: Maria Zack and Greg Crow

• Brian Chen and Hernan Oscco, Angle Constructability on Lattices: Why a dog and cat lattice can make the same angles, Cal Poly Pomona. Advisor: Greisy Winiki-Landman