Math conference held at Mount Holyoke

Earlier this year Mount Holyoke College hosted the twenty-ninth annual Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference. The annual conference brings together faculty and students from the greater Hudson Valley region for a day of talks on and about the mathematical sciences.

Held on April 1, 2023, the one-day mathematics conference provided undergraduate students with the experience of attending, and possibly presenting at, a professional mathematics meeting.

“We’ve been taking students to this conference my whole career at the College,” said Margaret Robinson, the Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke.

The goal of taking students every year to the conference, she continued, is “to show students what mathematics is really about” and “to show how much fun it is to be a mathematician.” To that end, Robinson said, they try to make sure first-year students attend, and this year the conference also had attendees from community colleges and high schools.

The keynote speaker this year was Rosa C. Orellana, professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College. Three Mount Holyoke community members gave presentations: Visiting Lecturer in Mathematics Samantha Kirk, “Introduction to Lie Algebras”; Assistant Professor of Statistics Isabelle Beaudry, “Reducing Biases in Survey Data”; Elizabeth Yu ’24, “Applications of Kuratowski’s Theorem”; and Beatriz Rodriguez ’24, “Where’s the Circle? Finding π in ∑_(n=1)^∞ 1/n^2 = π^2/6.”

Eighty-five talks in total were given, including those from students from Vassar College, Keene State College, Tufts University, Fordham University and others.

More than 50 Mount Holyoke students and faculty attended or volunteered at the conference. This year the conference was funded by Mount Holyoke College and collaborative National Science Foundation grants.