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Michigan Alpha
Michigan State University
2008-2009 Chapter Report
Advisor and Officers
Advisor: Professor Andrew Christlieb
President: Victoria McCoy
Vice President: Ziying Pan
Secretary: Stefan Johnson
Treasurer: Jonathan Matthews
Number of New Members Inducted:
9
Number of Continuing Members:
8
Describe the two most interesting or unusual chapter activities this year:
The MSU chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon holds weekly meetings. The group was excited by implementation of a new meeting format starting Spring 2009. The weekly meeting topic/agenda now rotates by week. The first week involves a mini-mathematics competition with small prizes. The second week is devoted to problem solving or famous problem deconstruction with problems emailed to students in advance. The third week is a faculty lecture and the final week is a math related movie night. The most interesting meeting or event of the 2008-2009 academic year was the Integration Bee. Nine students particpated. The students formed 3 teams to complete 7 rounds. Each round involved one problem. For each problem, the first person on a team had 1-5 minutes to solve it (depending on the difficulty), then the second person had half that time to finish the problem, and so on. The first team to finish the integral scored a point. The first place team received Rubik's cubes as prizes. It was especially fun because all the members knew how to integrate, so everyone could take part, and integrals are typically more straightforward than most math competition problems.
Do any of your chapter members plan to attend or present a paper at the 2009 PME national meeting at MathFest in Portland, Oregon?
Unfortunately, we were not able to attend the 2009 PME national meeting.
Do you have any news about current students or recent graduates, for example, scholarships or other awards, acceptances to graduate school, paper presentations at conferences?
Victoria McCoy was selected as a 2009 Goldwater Scholar and participated in Mathematics of Origami REU at University of Georgia in Athens during the summer 2009. Ziying Pan started work on a PhD-Mathematics at the University of Illinois Fall 2009.
