Hood Cohosts Mathematics Conference

In April, the Department of Mathematics at Hood College partnered with Frederick Community College to cohost the Mathematical Association of America MD-DC-VA Spring 2019 section meeting. This is a regional math conference open to all institutions in the MD-DC-VA area.

There were 219 total participants including 101 faculty members, 116 undergraduate students and two graduate students. All of Hood’s full-time math faculty attended the conference—Professors Sara Malec, Van Nguyen, James Parson, Ann Stewart, Jill Tysse and Bin Wang.

The conference included presentations by professors, competitions for students and student poster presentations.

Hood students competed in the radical dash competition and in math jeopardy. Radical dash is a day-long scavenger hunt filled with math challenges and creative activities, tasking teams with solving math problems and puzzles, finding mathematical objects in everyday life, and hunting down locations throughout the conference. Math Jeopardy was classic Jeopardy, but the categories were all math related.

Hood’s radical dash team of William Bekanich ’22, Zachary Dorris (a high school student taking classes at Hood), Lauren Thompson ’20 and Jenna Frick ’21 won the competition. Another team of Hood students also competed, comprised of Valentin Donchev ’21, Sam Driscoll ’22, Ann Coleman ’22 and Natalie Kolosieke ’21.

Hood’s Jeopardy team of Matthew Brem ’19, Brian Burtner ’19 and Valentin Donchev ’21 placed third.

Eight Hood seniors presented posters at the conference. Listed in the order, from left, as they are pictured above:

• Matthew Brem, “Fourier’s Transformation: An Equation Ahead of its Time”
• Jared Knowles, “Galileo and the Church: an Idea and a Trial”
• Justin Nelson, “Calculus in Economics”
• Susannah Noppenberger, “The Journey of Mathematical Physics: From France to Germany”
• Kara Conway, “Encryption in World War II: Beyond Enigma”
• Colin Williams, “The Difficulty of Transcendence”
• Kyle Moir, “The ‘Golden’ Ratio”
• Alexandra Harbord, “Mathematics and Sundials: Exploring the Influences”