Date and Venue: July 28 to August 1, 2025, Department of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh.
This event is free of charge. We will specifically encourage females of underserved groups to apply.
Registration Link: The registration will be open in February 2025. If you have any questions, please contact us at: girlsatPitt@gmail.com
Event Description: This program is a continuation of the pilot program Girls' Summer Math Camp 2024. This 5-day long event is aimed at female high school students (ages 15-17) attending schools in the greater Pittsburgh area with the objective to expose the participants to different areas in mathematics and thereby spark the interest in mathematics among female pupils and contribute to the development of future female scientists.
Tentative Schedule:
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9am - noon |
noon - 1:15pm |
1:15pm - 4:00pm |
4:15pm - 5pm |
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Monday, July 28 |
Lectures |
Lunch |
Group Projects |
Research Talk |
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Tuesday, July 29 |
Lectures |
Lunch |
Group Projects |
Lab Tour |
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Wednesday, July 30 |
Lectures |
Lunch |
Group Projects |
Research Talk |
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Thursday, July 31 |
Lectures |
Lunch |
Group Projects |
Introduction to the Undergraduate Program at Pitt |
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Friday, August 1 |
Group Projects |
Lunch |
Student Presentations |
Closing of the Program |
Each day, except for Friday, is structured in the same way. The morning consists of lectures concerning the specific area of Mathematics, prepared and executed by the expert faculty. This is followed by lunch (provided by the organizers) and further followed in the afternoon by adequate group-projects, where students can test their understanding of the material taught in the morning session. The group-project sessions will be supervised by the graduate students who are members in the Pitt chapter AWM Department of Mathematics. The specific group-project tasks will be developed by the faculty who taught the corresponding morning session. Each such topics day ends with a talk by a Pitt affiliated researcher. We will also try to organize a field trip to a physics or biology lab, and a final panel Q&A where students can ask questions about the Mathematics undergraduate program at Pitt. On Friday morning, students will continue working on their projects, that will be presented after lunch and completed with students obtaining the participation certificates.
Poster: (click on the image below to download the file)
Location and Address
Department of Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh. The pick up and drop off location is at the Parking Lot of the University Club, right in front of the main entrance. More information will be available one week before the event.
Speaker Information
Organizers: Marta Lewicka, Sabrina Streipert, AWM chapter University of Pittsburgh
Principal Supervising Faculty:
Professor Marta Lewicka: Mathematical Analysis
This course will be a non-technical introduction to a fashionable field of Analysis, called the Convex Integration. Consider the surface of the Earth. The theory we will study implies, in particular, that it is possible to deform it in the 3d space without contracting or elongating distances, in a way that its image is contained inside a ball of arbitrarily small radius. Hence the distance between any two points, e.g. between Pittsburgh and Sydney, is realized along a curve of the actual distance length, winding and corrugating within a radius, say, one inch. Additionally, all derivatives of this deformation can be arranged to be more than continuous, and there are infinitely many ways of such a construction. How is this possible!?
Professor Roxana Popescu: Number Theory
The lecture will start with a review of the elementary number theory, including concepts such as: divisibility, prime numbers, congruences, the Chinese remainder theorem, primitive roots, quadratic residues and sum of squares. In the second part, we will continue with multiplicative functions, in particular the Dirichlet product, divisor sums and the Mobius Inversion Formula. A special attention will also be dedicated to Hermite’s Identity and generalizations of it. Finally, we will focus on several applications, in particular on a variation of the famous Hilbert-Waring problem.
Professor Sabrina Streipert: Mathematical Biology
You will receive an introduction to mathematical biology and learn about how mathematics can be used to help understand biological processes and predict their behavior. You will receive an introduction to different mathematical techniques to describe biological processes mathematically and explore computational tools to investigate these mathematical models. We will focus particularly on population modeling using discrete mathematics and graph theory to model species that are moving between patches.
Professor Evgeni Trofimov: Foundations and Logic
This course is designed for high school students to introduce the foundational concepts of mathematics. We will begin by understanding fundamental mathematical objects: sets and relations. Building on these, we will construct functions and then explore how logic can be created using binary functions. Through engaging examples and hands-on activities, students will discover how these concepts form the backbone of mathematical thinking. By the end of the course, participants will have a deeper appreciation of abstract reasoning and its applications in problem-solving.
Other Faculty Involved:
Professor Edward Chou (Department of Mathematics)
Professor Jason Deblois (Department of Mathematics)
Dr. Rahnuma Islam (Department of Mathematics)
Professor Anna Vainchtein (Department of Mathematics)
Contact us at: girlsatPitt@gmail.com