By Andrea Yan and Henry Sun Michael Barresi, a Professor of Biological Sciences at Smith College, was the speaker for the Biology Monday Seminar on December 4th. A prominent developmental biologist specializing in the development of vertebrae brains, he is a co-author of the widely-used textbook Developmental Biology. In his talk, he guided us through…
From boat ropes to shoelaces, knots are found everywhere in our day-to-day lives. But where things really get tied up is on the microscopic scale. Even the basic code for life inside our cells can sometimes be prone to tangles. So, why exactly are knots found in our DNA, and what are the biological causes?…
By Andrea Yan and Henry Sun Cover image credit: https://lsa.umich.edu/chem/people/faculty/gshultz.html In a packed Kirkpatrick Lecture Hall on October 18th, students and faculty in the Chemistry Department gathered for the week’s Cheminar series, which addressed an unconventional topic. Ginger Shultz, the week’s speaker, is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Associate Chair for Education Development and…
Following the advent of ChatGPT, natural language processing (NLP) has gained immense public attention and is very in demand. In fact, OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has propelled its valuation to $157 billion on October 2, 2024. As a new addition to the faculty at Amherst College, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Shira Wein…
On September 25, 2024, Gabriel Sosa Castillo delivered a talk about his research on reconstructible monomial orderings at the Amherst College Math Colloquium. Sosa Castillo previously worked at the College as an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department and now works at Colgate University. Sosa Castillo specializes in computational and combinatorial commutative algebra, which refers…
Photo and article by Maya Maaloul What makes changes in data significant? How do we, as humans with subjective opinions, decide this? What methods can detect these changes the best, and what if we can’t find the best tool? During an Amherst College Statistics and Data Science (SDS) Colloquium on September 24, Ben Baumer, a…
By Fernanda On January 19, twelve Amherst College students (including myself!) hopped in a car to Boston for the American Physical Society Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (APS CUWiP). CUWiPs are three-day regional conferences for undergraduate physics majors who identify as women or a gender minority, with the goal of helping them continue in physics…
By Ryogo Katahira Klara Matuszewska ’26 won a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award for 2024. The award is to “recognize exemplary research by undergraduate and graduate students” and is selected by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Matuszekska is a physics and astronomy double major from Warsaw, Poland and works in Professor Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi’s research…
Photo by Maria Stenzel By Olivia Fann As prospective math majors may have noticed, a certain department was notably absent from 2024 SURF opportunities. This year’s lineup of nine disciplines and 36 total labs participating in Amherst’s Summer Science Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) did not include any members of the math faculty, raising some questions…
By Bibi Hanselman a2 + b2 = c2. Whether it’s a distant high school memory or it has found its way into your physics homework somehow, there’s no denying that the Pythagorean theorem — timeless and profound, seared into all our memories — is practically a cultural touchstone in addition to a mathematical one. On…