Trigonometry and Astronomy

My talk for Wednesday December 7th will be about the history of trigonometry along with some mathematicians associated with trig, and how trigonometry can be used in Astronomy. By reading the article by Herb Silverman called, Trigonometric Identities through...

The Irrationality in Nature

My talk on December 7th is based on the article Golden, Sqrt{2}, and π Flowers: A Spiral Story, written by Michael Naylor, found in Vol. 75, No. 3 (Jun., 2002) of the Mathematics Magazine. I will discuss the contents of this article on how we can find important...

Pattern Detection Using Graph Theory

My presentation on Wednesday, November 2nd was inspired by the paper entitled Pattern detection in forensic case data using graph theory: Application to heroin cutting agents which can be found on ScienceDirect, from August 2006. This paper was written by a group...

How Puzzles Help You Write Proofs

My talk on Wednesday November 3rd is based on an article found in the journal, The Mathematics Teacher, Vol. 103, No. 4 from November 2009 titled Japanese Logic Puzzles & Proof written by Jeffrey J. Wanko. It discusses how solving Japanese logic puzzles such as...

Tower of Hanoi and Nim

My presentation on Wednesday, October 26th was inspired by Mark MacLean’s article Math in The Real World: Mathematical Moments from Reality Television, which can be found in Math Horizons Vol. 12, No. 4 from April 2005. In his article, MacLean points out challenges...

Scary Monsters in Mathematics

My talk on October 19th is about "Monsters" in Mathematics. The foundation in mathematics prior to about the 19th century was modelling our physical world. We can think of it all the way back to Euclid and his Geometry, where he was working a lot on intuition. By the...

Triangular Numbers, Gaussian Integers and KenKen

My MAT 381 presentation on Wednesday October 12 is on using elements of number theory in order to solve the newspaper puzzle Kenken and to make it a bit more challenging. KenKen is a puzzle that appears in daily newspapers the world over and is similar to Sudoku. In...

Math and the Buffalo Promise Neighborhood

Buffalo Promise Neighborhood is a not-for-profit organization that is dedicated to improving the educational and developmental outcomes of children within neighborhood schools. M&T Bank, through BPN, has a public/private partnership with three local schools:...