Integration Bee
The 2024 Pitt Undergraduate Integration Bee took place in Alumni Hall 343 on Friday night, March 22, 2024. We were very excited to have 70+ Pitt undergraduates competed and 30+ undergraduate came to observe. There were 4 math club members and 10+ graduate students and faculty members came to help organizing the event. In the pre-qualifying round, three integrals were given at once. With the time limit, we had 21 contestants correctly evaluated those integrals. In the two showcase rounds, 14 contestants made to Round 2 and four finalists were selected with ranking after Round 2. The tournament was a head-to-head competition. Two semifinal integrals and a final integral determined the winners.
Alex Taylor (pictured above) claimed the 2024 Pitt Undergraduate Integration Bee Champion. The other winners, in order, were Renzhi Yongtian, Pranav Ande, and Lucas Pasdo. The winners shared the $200 in bookstore certificates as a reward for their great integration performance. Congratulations to the four winners, and to all contestants, who showed impressive integration talent!
THANK YOU to everyone who participated in this event in any way!!! It was great to have such enthusiastic contestants and audience members. Some of them walked away with top-notch door prizes such as Crayola 50ct super tips washable markers, Crayola 120ct Crayon set, and 9X6 UCreate Sketch Drawing book.
This event was made possible by:
- the organizing work of the Math Club members, Tristan Coogan, Aashrit Cunchala, Noah Kochavi, and Shea Paxton.
- the help of the faculty members, Doctors Thomas Everest, Thomas Hales, Jeremiah Morgan, Derek Orr, Roxana Popescu, and Sheng Xiong.
- the help of the graduate students Edison Hauptman, Eugene Eyeson, Delanna Do, and Asia Parker.
- the equipment and logistic help from the staff members Richard Misura, William Tarleton, Lou Lane, Phillip Fry, Dylan Knapp-Scott, Jason Irwin, Carol Cawley, and Diane Bova.
- the advertising efforts of many TAs and faculty members from Math Department and the David C. Federick Honors College.
Finally, as always, THANKS to the David C. Federick Honors College and the Math Department for funding this competition!
PIMRS Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Research
Volume 1 of PIMR is something we’re proud of – it’s the first collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh Library System and the Mathematics Department, and it’s now the flagship journal of the University Library. If you want to get a better idea of PIMR’s mission and scope, the “From the Editors, Volume 1” is a precise source. Since its launch in April 2024, Volume 1 has had 4,083 reads, with 372 of those just this month, which is really exciting.
A few highlights from Volume 1 include a significant book review of Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics by Mellon Professor Tom Hales. Former Department Chair Professor Jon Rubin in his interview reflected on his career, the Pitt community, and gave advice to both graduate and undergraduate students. Professor Jason DeBlois, former Undergraduate Director, explained what undergraduate research in mathematics looks like and gave tips for students who want to get involved. Graduate student Edison Hauptman posed an interesting challenge for readers: “Why isn’t there an inverse quotient rule?” A recently graduated undergrad and a former Painter Fellow Riley Debski, mentored by Professor Carl Wang-Erickson, explored how math is used to encode and decode messages. Another recently graduated Neil MacLachlan, now starting his PhD at the University of Michigan, shared his experiences with the graduate application process and reflected on some of Pittsburgh’s mathematical history. Professor Paul Gartside contributed a fantastic “Proofs Without Words.”
Although PIMR is sponsored by the Pitt Math Department and published by the University of Pittsburgh Library, the editorial team includes undergraduate students from the Pittsburgh area. Many of the editors from the inaugural issue have since graduated and are now pursuing graduate studies at their dream places including the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and Northwestern University. On top of all that, we recently got word that the Library of Congress plans to add PIMR to their digital collections. The leadership of the University Library sees this as a great honor that will bring greater reputation and discoverability for the journal.
Now, Volume 2 is nearly ready and expected to be published in October 2024. It's shaping up to be even stronger than the first, both in quality and quantity. That said, I assume your newsletter covers events up to the start of Fall 2024? So, I won’t spoil too much about Volume 2 as folks will see it soon enough once it’s released!
MathFest 2024
MathFest, held the afternoon of Thursday April 11, capped off a great year of undergraduate research in the Math Department. The centerpiece of this year’s event was a poster presentation that featured 14 submitted posters, each describing a research project carried out by an undergraduate or team of undergraduates under the supervision of a Math Department faculty member. The projects covered a wide variety of topics and methods spanning pure and applied math. Between the poster presenters who were there to give further detail on their projects, and other Math Department community members including faculty, graduate students, and other undergraduates, the lounge was packed.
Faculty judges Tom Hales, Michael Neilan, Catalin Trenchea, Carl Wang-Erickson, and Stephan Wojtowytsch, spent a substantial amount of time and energy visiting as many posters as they could and talking with the presenters. Based on their evaluation’s prizes were awarded in two specific categories plus the overall:
Clarity of Presentation
- Optimizing Major League Baseball Lineups (Casey Dinan, Katelyn Donaty, Kenny Han, James Holland, Winston Osei-Bonsu; mentor Jeff Wheeler)
- Barron Spaces for Laplace’s Equation with ReLu^k Boundary (Malhar Vaishampayan; mentor Stephan W.)
- Optimizing Investment Strategies of Pension Plans (Chris Deboni, Anna Minor, Peter Ridolfi, Misha Trosman; mentor Jeff Wheeler)
Mathematical Depth
- Barron Spaces for Laplace's Equation with ReLu^k Boundary
- Analysis and Simulation of Spirals in Neuronal Networks (Neil Maclachlan; mentor Bard Ermentrout)
- Three-way tie:
- Coffee Futures Forecasting with Transformers (John Hohman; mentor Jeff Wheeler)
- Optimizing Investment Strategies of Pension Plans
- Revised Proof of the a=2 case of the Chung-Diaconis-Graham Random Process (Jen Wang; mentor Jeff Wheeler)
And the Overall Winners
- The Smoothed Decagon Problem (Lark Song and Sasha Sluis-Cremer; mentor Tom Hales)
- The Truncated Octahedral Conjecture (Lark Song; mentor Tom Hales)
- Poincare Disk Image Tiling (Sam Brunacini; mentor Jason DeBlois)
We congratulate all these winners and their mentors for doing fantastic work, with a special shout-out to Jeff Wheeler -- he mentored seven (!!) submitted poster projects, including multiple award winners, several of them coming from his BIG Problems class (MATH 1103).
Special thanks to staff members Greg P, who coordinated the printing of all those posters and the food; Jason I, who handled the on-site logistics; and our student helper Saransh who did yeoman’s work getting the posters assembled and posted. More broadly, we thank all Department members who committed time and energy over the course of the year to giving our undergraduates a deeper experience with the subject we love.
Graduation Awards
2024 Culver Prize Recipients
- Caroline Burns
- Gregory P. Constantine
- Evan Hyzer
- Neil MacLachlan
- Lindsay Miller
- Lark Song
- Eli Ullman-Kissel
- Jen Wang
2024 Silverman-Culver Recipient (undergraduate)
- Annie Wang
Dr. Beverly K. Michael Math Education Award
- Kyra Patenaude