Students Participate at World’s Largest Math Meeting

“I was surprised at the sheer size of the math world,” said first-year student Isaiah Conway, reflecting on his trip with fellow students and faculty to the world’s largest mathematics conference Jan. 3-6 in San Francisco. Ten students and three faculty members were among nearly 6,000 other mathematicians at annual Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), hosted by the American Mathematical Society. 

“I had never been exposed to the different fields, the different problems, the organizations, the people, or even the math celebrities,” Conway said. “I learned so much about the vast community of mathematics in this one weekend and there is so much more I want to learn now.”

At the event, Maryke van der Walt, Westmont associate professor of mathematics, spoke about her research, “A function approximation approach to the prediction of blood glucose levels,” and sophomore Sam Tang shared his summer research, “Probabilistic questions relating to a certain type of function that is analytic in the unit disk.”

Senior Bailey Hall was part of a poster presentation, “Cutoff in the Bernoulli-Laplace Model with Unequal Colors and Urn Sizes,” that reported on research from her summer undergraduate research experience at Iowa State University. 

The group, which stayed at the Westmont in San Francisco House in Pacific Heights, also attended a reception for the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences. 

“The students had an incredible experience and were astounded at the vastness of the mathematics world as well as the diverse mathematical interests of the attendees, such as art, biology, epidemiology, social justice, climate change and food supply,” says Anna Aboud, assistant professor and chair of the mathematics and computer science department. “It is exceedingly rare for undergraduate students to have the opportunity to attend, much less present at, a national conference in their discipline.”