2015 FAU Math Day (Pi Day)!

Dr. Klingler, Ms. Emily Cimillo, Dr. Schonbek.

Pi Day Math Day Maetri

The eleventh annual FAU Math Day held on what was the Pi Day of the century, Saturday, March 14, 2015, on the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University, was once again a success. Apart from all this, everybody seems to have had a very good time. The morning competition was interrupted for a few seconds at 9:26 and everybody cheered for the many digits of Pi in action. An interesting fact is that if time were continuous (which quantum theory does not quite allow) then sometime between 9:26 and 9:27 ALL the digits of Pi would be displayed.- Dr. T. Schonbek, Florida Atlantic University (From the FAU Math Day 2014 page, circa March 2014) More after the jump!

MATH DAY! (Extra points to the kid in last year's shirt!)

Some of our wonderful volunteers!

Once again this year I volunteered as a lead volunteer for FAU's Math Day. Aside from this being a rather special day to have Math Day, it was the day after a really long double Research Day for me. I'm not sure how I made it through the day, except for sheer enthusiasm! I love seeing students excited about an academic competition. My only complaint is that I STILL didn't get to see the talk, third time in a row! Normally I'm told I "would have been bored, anyway" and that a lot of our mathematics grad students don't understand what's told, as the speakers tend to fail to scale down for the audience. From the look of the credits-slides, and the raucous clapping, I think this year's speaker accomplished gaining interest and understanding.

Speaker: Colin Adams, professor of mathematics at Williams College.

He took us through a harrowing sailing experience in which a great white shark and the storm of the millennium imperiled his life, and yet thanks to Knot Theory, he managed to escape unscathed.

In addition to the posted prizes, winners of the morning competition were given signed copies of Professor Adams book on knots. - FAU Math Day website

You may recognize the name Colin Adams from the hilarious Pi vs E Debate. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it! (I'll just leave the first one here.)

Dr. Adams would not be able to stay for the whole day, but did stay long enough to have lunch with some members of our mathematics department, specifically one professor and two Ph.D. candidates. (Ha! Shane was one of them! He says Dr. Adams is basically awesome.)

Dr. Adams has our math department enthralled at lunch!

And one shy mathematician wonders what the shiny clicky box is.

After the morning's individual competition, a great speaker, and lunch, comes the team competition. The iClickers are used to score History points, and slips of paper used for calculative questions. The latter are scored based on the time the hand their answer in, and then of course whether their answer in correct. It's a bit of madness for the volunteers. It's unfortunate that in fun competitions like this you can still find students cheating. Usually, of course, it's someone on a team that isn't doing well anyway. And the answers that come in are pale shadows of the right answer. For instance, if the correct answer looked like 3.14/x, the cheater could only roughly see the other team's slip and turned in 314/x or 814/x. It happened several times. I had to Teacher Stare a girl I saw just outright staring over another team's shoulders, and she was so intent she still didn't get the hint. I had to send a runner over to distract her long enough to give her the Glare and Smile. Ugh!

Runners and Judges and iClickers, oh my!

And the Winners ARE:

Individual competition:

1. 1st Place Kim Nguyun, FLSAM Unaffiliated; 
2. 2nd Place Kyle Gettig,

Team Competition:

1. Highest Math Score: With a Math score of 27 points, Seminole High School.

2. Highest Overall Score: With a Math score of 24 and a Trivia Score of 10 points, FLSAM

unaffiliated.

3. Highest History/Trivia Score: With a History score of 10 points, American Heritage

Plantation.

I'm sorry I don't have photos for everyone. The photographer that day did not post/distribute the photos to anyone else! Hopefully, they'll end up on the department Flickr with the sets from the last few years, and if so, I will update this with the winning teams photos. I would especially like the one with all the winners for the day at the front receiving their awards!

Thank you so much to the Wells Fargo sponsors and volunteers that came out to help out with this event! Thank you also to the rest of our sponsors, the volunteer students, the volunteer professors, and Dr. Colin Adams! THANK YOU STUDENTS FOR BEING AWESOME!

Thank you Wells Fargo!