Institution: Purdue Fort Wayne
Reporting Year: 2021-2022
Advisor: Daniel Yorgov
Advisor's Email Address: yorgovd@pfw.edu
Has There Been a Change in Chapter Advisor During the Past Year?: Yes. Outgoing advisor: Lowell Beineke
Permanent Faculty Correspondent: Drake Olejniczak
Permanent Faculty Correspondent's Email Address: dpolejni@pfw.edu
Officers: Kale Menchhofer - menckm01@pfw.edu Kelly Ann Bertram - bertka02@pfw.edu Tessa Thatcher - thattc01@pfw.edu
Chapter Website: http://
Number of New Members: 12
Number of Continuing Members: 0
Activities: We had an invited speaker, Dr. Alexis Byers from Youngstown State University, who gave a talk titled "A Colorful Introduction to Graph Theory." In the talk, she gave a nice introduction to research projects she has worked on with undergraduates, and she inspired our undergraduates to mathematically explore, be creative, and to not be afraid of failure. The Math Matters event, while regular at our institution, is perhaps unusual for the larger community. We invite undergraudate and graduate students to present short talks on a topic of their choice - whether a research project supervised by a faculty member or a general topic of mathematical interest. We invite a few faculty members to judge the talks and prizes are awarded to the top three talks as determined by our faculty judges. Due to the pandemic, this was not done the past two years, so we were pleased to be able to continue this tradition at our institution. With pizza and refreshments provided by the department, along with monetary donations from the faculty and matching funds from the national organization, the event was a smashing success.
Do any of your chapter members plan to attend or present at the PME National Meeting this year?
Do you have any news about current students or recent graduations? For example, scholarships or other awards, acceptances to graduate school, paper presentations at conferences, etc.
If you were awarded a PME Lectureship, Conference, or Prize Grant within the past year, please briefly describe the results.
I have described the Math Matters event above. We received a $100 faculty donation and applied for a matching prize grant from the national organization which we received. The $200 prize pool was split among our first, second, and third place finishers with $100 to first, $60 to second, and $40 to third place. The first place prize was awarded for the talk titled "Using Statistical Models to Predict the Genre of Music". Second place was awarded for "An Introduction to Steins Paradox in Statistics". And the third place prize was awarded for the talk "Data Augmentation with Affine Transformations". A flyer and photos from the event are attached. We greatly appreciate the support of our faculty judges, faculty donations, and the national organization which combined to make this a meaningful event not only for the student speakers - who now have more experience giving mathematical talks - but also the students who attended to listen, support, and gain inspiration from their colleagues.