[Mathmajors] Math Club News (Pizza and Talk on Tuesday!)

[ekirkm at u.washington.edu]

Welcome back!  The math club is planning an eventful year, please read through the whole email to find out what events are coming soon.  Since we currently don't have an up-to-date mailing list (see the section on the new website), we are sending this to Mathmajors and ACMSMajors.  Hopefully, that also serves to inform new students that there is a club up and running.  However, this will not continue throughout the year.  Once we have a current mailing list established, we will switch over to that list only.  So keep your eyes peeled for instructions on how to sign up, and make sure you do sign up if you want to continue to participate in the math club this year.

Contents:
0.  Background Information
1.  New Officers
2.  New Website Coming Soon
3.  Accepting T-shirt Designs (Rules below).
4.  First Pizza/Talk this Tuesday (5 pm in PDL C-36).  (See abstract below).
5.  College Puzzle Day!



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* 0. Background Information
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The math club at UW is a group of students interested in mathematics.  It is a social club and open to everyone.  Activities tend to include putting on lectures on current research, offering up free pizza and sponsoring functions like a departmental dinner.  We recently received RSO status (http://depts.washington.edu/sao/rso.php) due to some work by our Vice President, Alex Mendez.  We plan to reinstate our chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon (http://www.pme-math.org/) this year, and will be looking for applicants shortly.  We also would like to try some new things this year:  Ideas that were introduced include having a (math) grad/undergrad luncheon and some kind of inter-departmental social event would encourage networking across similar fields.  More ideas are always welcome, and we'll keep you up to date on these things as they solidify.



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* 1. New Officers
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The new officers for the year are listed below:

President:  Emily Kirkman (ekirkm at u.washington.edu)
Vice President:  Alex Mendez
Secretary:  Crista Moreno
Treasurer:  Kunal Vaswani
Webmaster:  Dan Siddoway



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* 2. New Website Coming Soon
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The link to the math club website is currently a dead link.  Over the summer, we lost our old site during the server migration.  But Dan is cranking it out and we'll hopefully have a new site running soon.  Please check back on it, as we've lost at least part of our mailing list and you may need to sign up for membership again.



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* 3. T-shirt Designs
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Everyone's favorite fundraiser is t-shirts!  Submissions will be due by November 2nd.  They can only be submitted by email (ekirkm at u.washington.edu) with subject line reading "Math Club T-shirt".  They must be full-size and in PDF format.  Black and white only.  (The color of the shirts will also be voted on).  If you have a question about the rules or would like us to make an exception, then send an email also with the subject, "Math Club T-shirt" (and your question in the body).  We will let you know when the voting is open (probably on the website) and t-shirts will be available by pre-order only once the voting is complete and we announce the design.


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* 4. First Pizza/Talk
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Bobby Moretti will be giving the first seminar talk of the year this Tuesday (Oct. 9th) in PDL C-36.  In general, the talks will be on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month at the same time/place.  (And we will typically serve food -- this time, it's pizza).

The 2nd Tuesday of each month will be a talk geared toward freshman/sophomores or non-majors.  (This is also a great opportunity for undergrads to speak -- send me an email if you'd like to share your research).  The fourth Tuesday will be geared toward upperclassmen.  We will typically post the abstracts on the website.  But since we don't have a website up yet, the abstract for Bobby's talk follows in this email.

Bobby's Abstract:
"I will introduce the computer math system known as SAGE (www.sagemath.org). I
will show science, math, and engineering students how to use SAGE in
their area of study. SAGE is an open source program that aims to
provide a viable free and open source alternative to Magma, Maple,
Mathematica and MATLAB. Started in 2005 by UW mathematics professor
William Stein, SAGE has grown into a highly functional general purpose
mathematics computing package. Best of all, there are several UW
undergraduates involved in SAGE development. You could be one too!"


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* 5. College Puzzle Day
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This is a message passed along by Yi Qiang, an undergrad math major (senior).  Please read and respond to him if you are interested.  It sounds pretty fun.

"Hi, we are looking for one more person who loves puzzles and free food to join us in the upcoming collegepuzzlechallenge.com event.  You can find out more about the event at the website, but the basic gist is that you do puzzles for 10 to 12 hours, eat good free food and meet some great people.  We participated last year and it was a blast and we are looking for one more person to join our team (of 4 people) for this years competition.  If you are interested, please contact Yi Qiang ( yqiang at gmail.com). "



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* 6. In Closing...
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Thanks for taking the time to read all the way through this.  I look forward to an exciting year.

Your President,
Emily Kirkman