On Friday, Nov. 7 and Saturday, Nov. 8, St. Norbert College hosted the Pi Mu Epsilon Regional Conference. Pi Mu Epsilon is the national honor society for mathematics. Every year, the St. Norbert PME chapter hosts a conference, inviting undergraduate students from schools in the area to come on campus to present their summer or semester research or independent study. Student speakers this year came from St. Norbert, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, Carthage College, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, Wisconsin Lutheran College and Ripon College.
The conference started with a greeting message from chapter president Tyler Blom (‘27) from St. Norbert, welcoming all attendees and noting the topics that students will present. Immediately afterwards, the first presentations by students. After a half dozen presentations on artificial intelligence neural networks, functional analysis and dice among others, Dr. Lauren Rose, a mathematics professor from Bard College gave a presentation. As the co-creator of the card game, EvenQuads, her presentation dives into the history of the game and the research that her and her students worked on. The last event before Friday closed out was a game of FaceOff! hosted by the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh. FaceOff! is a “Jeopardy!”-style competition with questions related to mathematics where each team of four plays as a famous mathematician, such as Carl Friedrich Gauss or Leonhard Euler. This was the last time that FaceOff! would be held as one of the faculty members running the game is retiring at the end of the school year. After the game ended, everyone gathered for pizza and broke for the day.
The next morning, students and faculties returned for more student presentations on affine geometry, taxicab geometry, a prediction model for H1N1 and more. Dr. Rose also had another presentation on the game Spot It! and dominoes. She weaved the research that she and her students did for the games as well as promoting research to the audience in the room. As she ended her talk, so did the conference. Most attendees filtered out while others still loitered about. Since the end of the conference, the mathematics discipline of St. Norbert has been working on organizing next year’s conference.