The belief that math is difficult or even boring is commonplace, but Audrey Rosevear, the Math Club president, doesn’t think it has to be. Math Club was created as a haven where students can explore what math looks like in research and beyond in a stakes-free environment, as well as a forum to discuss mathematical…
Understand Your Attacker. Then You Can Defend
(adapted from a Zoom interview between Samantha Rydzewski and Sarah Lapean) Samantha Rydzewski, a computer science and math double major, took some time out of her busy schedule on March 22 to tell us about her thesis with the computer science department. She is looking at suboptimal attacks against machine learning models, and investigating how…
How Do the Humanities and AI Connect?
More than 20 curious students, faculty, and members of the Pioneer Valley community hopped onto Zoom on March 24th, 2021 to find the answer to the question, “How do the humanities and artificial intelligence connect?” The talk was facilitated by Visiting Professor Lee Spector, who founded Amherst College’s Arts in the Liberal Arts initiative this…
Revisiting Gradients of Functions in a New, Discretized World
Being in the class of 2021E, I started my mathematics thesis in Spring 2020, and actually concluded it in Fall 2020, officially handing it in on the 11th of November. It was under the supervision of two advisors: Professor Ivan Contreras, a close mentor whose work with a prior summer I hoped to continue in…
Welcome to Womxn in Computer Science at Amherst!
This article was written by Guest Reporters April Dottin-Carter’23 (WiCS President), Karen Liu’23 (WiCS Secretary and Website Content Writer), and Hope Tsai’23 (WiCS Website Content Writer). To learn more about WiCS, check out their website shown above! April Dottin-Carter ’23 believes that when people with strong, positive morals and diverse backgrounds come together to innovate…
Remember Your “Why”: How Psychology Majors Become Educators
On March 9th, Professor Palmquist led the latest conversation of the Psychology Department Spring 2021 Lecture Series. She spoke with Anna Vuong ’18 and Sydney “Kramer” Peterson ’17 about how they went from psychology majors at Amherst to their current jobs as teachers. Anna was a psychology major who was involved in Ed Pros, QuestBridge,…
More Than Just a Headache: A Lecture About Migraines in the U.S
You are working on a 15-page essay at 2 in the morning, and just as you start your concluding paragraph, a burst of pain shoots to your head. The pain lingers for another 4 hours before you call it quits and decide to write the rest of your essay after a good night’s (or morning’s?)…
“Building Equity”: A Talk with Prof. Janice Hudgings
In the early weeks of Fall 2016, Prof. Janice Hudgings of Pomona College tasked the sophomores in her Modern Physics course with identifying the scientists whose work was presented in the course textbook. The results: of the credited scientists, 99% were male, and 98% were white. These statistics are only the beginning. Since the late…
Planetary cradles: UMass/FCAD colloquium speaker Feng Long presents ALMA view of early solar systems
Solar systems like ours begin as pancakes of dust and gas left over after a star forms. Over time, the dust within these “circumstellar disks” coagulate into planetesimals that will eventually form planets like the Earth. During this early stage of solar system evolution, these circumstellar disks are called “protoplanetary disks” because planets have not…
The Math and the History Behind the Archimedean Solids
In his colloquium “Polyhedra: Plato, Archimedes, Euler,” Professor Robert Benedetto explains the mathematical history of the Archimedean solids – which include geometric forms like the truncated icosahedron, very reminiscent of a soccer ball but with flat faces instead of imposed on a spherical surface – and the proof that defines this set of 13 polyhedra….