Isabel Weil, born in Brooklyn on May 19, 1923 and the first in her family to attend college, was nominated by Hunter College to Pi Mu Epsilon in 1942, just as her father suffered a stroke and died. She found an office job in a lipstick factory, switched from Hunter full time to night classes and graduated a year late. She became a beloved New York City junior high school math teacher. She loved math puzzles and stumping nears and dears with birthday checks calculated using days, hours and years lived.

She often said her greatest regret was not joining Pi Mu Epsilon. Through the efforts of Barry M. Cherkas, chair of the Hunter College Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and faculty advisor Tatyana Khodorovskiy, on February 19, 2021, Isabel Weil Gros became the oldest new member of Pi Mu Epsilon, and maybe the happiest new member ever, 79 years after receiving her original invitation. She said she never expected to join and was thrilled to take the pledge! She died on March 17, 2021.

Her children, Melinda and Jacques, generously funded ‘The Isabel Weil Gros Award for Excellence in Mathematics’, a new annual monetary prize to be awarded to a Hunter College Pi Mu Epsilon nominee.

Screenshots from the 2021 PME award ceremony held via Zoom:

Thanks to councilors Darci Kracht and Frank Patane for the pictures.

Awards:

Council for Undergraduate Research Award for Outstanding Student Research

Ben Gobler, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MA Alpha, “Listing the Rationals using Continued Fractions”

Janet L. Andersen Award for Outstanding Student Exposition or Research in Mathematical or Computational Biology presented by BioSIGMAA

Katie Yan, Skidmore College, NY Alpha Theta, “Modeling the Plague in Eyam”

Pi Mu Epsilon Speaker Awards

Prizes for outstanding Pi Mu Epsilon student talks, presented at the virtual MathFest, August 6, 2021. Awards funded by the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, and Budapest Semesters in Mathematics for Excellence in Student Exposition or Research.

5th Recipient of the J. Douglas Faires Advisor Award

Professor Ken Roblee, advisor of the Alabama Eta chapter at Troy University, is the 5th recipient of the J. Douglas Faires Advisor Award. Ken was presented the award on August 6, 2021 at the virtual MathFest conference in recognition of his outstanding work with the Alabama Eta chapter, including the organization of Troy University MathFest. Troy MathFest is an annual regional conference that promotes undergraduate research and routinely attracts well over 100 participants each year.

The 2021 Pi Mu Epsilon (PME) National Meeting will be held at the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) virtual MathFest conference on August 4-7, 2021. Please visit http://pme-math.org/mathfest2021

Southern New Hampshire University Induction Ceremony, March 04, 2020

Prizes for outstanding Pi Mu Epsilon student talks, presented to students at the Pi Mu Epsilon Banquet and Award Ceremony, MathFest, August 2, 2019, Cincinnati, Ohio

Council for Undergraduate Research Award for Outstanding Student Research

Maia Wichman, Grand Valley State University, “Doubly Chorded Cycles in Graphs”

Janet L. Andersen Award for Outstanding Student Exposition or Research in Mathematical or Computational Biology presented by BioSIGMAA

Eric Leu, Hope College, “Remote Identification of Cloud Forest Landslides: A Machine Learning Approach”

Pi Mu Epsilon Speaker Awards

Awards funded by the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, and Budapest Semesters in Mathematics for Excellence in Student Exposition or Research

Haley Colgate, Colorado College, “Measuring Gerrymandering: Flaws in Traditional Measures”

Maria Cummings, Randolph-Macon College, “Investigations into the Discrete Arithmetic-Geometric Mean”

Amanda Cusimano, Xavier University, “3-cyclic bandwidth and 3-cyclic bandwidth critical graphs”

Niyousha Davachi, University of Texas at Arlington, “Equations of Mathematical Physics and Lagrangians”

Anthony Dickson, Youngstown State University, “On Inverse Semigroups Associated with Markov Subshifts”

Jonathan Feigert, Youngstown State University, “Presentations of Common Groups”

Martha Hartt, Randolph-Macon College, “A Proof of Bertrand’s Postulate”

Xiaomin Li, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Almost Beatty Partitions and Optimal Scheduling Problems”

Janelle Nelson, Howard University, “The Statistical Physics of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (IDPs)”

Marco Pettinato, Lewis University, “Predictive Modeling and Analysis of Softball Using Linear Algebra-based Ranking Systems”

Ryan Wartenberg, Washington College, “Triangulations and Tamari Lattices”

Isaac Weiss, College of Wooster, “Measuring Compactness of Legislative Districts”

Everett Yang, Texas A&M University, “A general algorithm for constrained robot motion planning”