15th Annual Sonia Kovalevsky Day

Oct 17, 2018

By Tommy Riggs

SK Day — From left, are high school students Catherin Lara, Tatum Horton and Thamar Kisalu in a workshop called “Math and Music: Listening to Rational and Irrational Numbers,” where the students played with Pythagorean monochords to explore the relationship between the length of a string and the pitch it produces when plucked.

FREDERICK, Maryland—Approximately 60 girls and teachers from seven high schools in Frederick County attended Hood College’s 15th Annual Sonia Kovalevsky Day for high school girls on Oct. 16 to learn about careers for women in math and explore interesting topics in mathematics. The event was co-sponsored by PNC Bank, U.S. Silica, and Frederick County Public Schools.

The day began with remarks from Debbie Ricker, Hood’s provost; Fred Genau, senior vice president and region manager of PNC Bank; and Laura Combs, IT audit manager at U.S. Silica. The students spent the day in math workshops, using math in a variety of disciplines.

Ann Stewart, Ph.D., associate professor of mathematics and chair of the department, taught “Math and Music: Listening to Rational and Irrational Numbers,” where the students played with Pythagorean monochords to explore the relationship between the length of a string and the pitch it produces when plucked.

Carol Jim, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science, led “Coding with Python Turtle,” in which students explored basic programming concepts, designed algorithms and drew simple graphical designs using the Python programming language’s turtle graphics system.

Gwyn Whieldon, from the National Security Agency, explained “Mathematics of South America,” which looked at math in ancient civilizations. She looked at the Incan system of “quipu,” a way of keeping records with knotted cords, and at the Aztec sacred calendar, which uses modular arithmetic to keep track of 260 days in a “year.”

Dana Lawrence, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry, led “Math in Science: What is a mole?”, in which students investigated what a mole represents—a quantity used extensively in chemistry and biochemistry to represent the number of items (molecules, atoms, photons, etc.) in a macroscopic lab-sized sample.

After the workshops, students listened to a presentation about the life of Sonia Kovalevsky by Hood student Susannah Noppenberger ’19. The day concluded with a career panel of women, consisting of Lisa Littlefield, director of Hood’s Center for Career Development and Experiential Education; alumna Megan Mercer ’15, a software engineer at iNovex Information Systems; Stephanie Reich, a cryptanalyst at the National Security Agency; and Blaza Toman, a mathematical statistician at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Sonia Kovalevsky Days were initially introduced by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) in 1985, and have been held at colleges and universities all over the country in the years since. These events honor Russian mathematician, Sonia Kovalevsky, the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics, and are designed to encourage and celebrate young women in their mathematical studies.