Spring Meeting of the Indiana MAA

Saturday, March 27, 2021
To take place via Zoom

Poster

• Click on the thumbnail image above to view a printable poster for the Spring 2021 meeting.

Program and Abstracts

• Program/Schedule
• Abstracts for Sessions

Registration

• Registration is open now through Wednesday, March 24th. All registered participants will receive an email on Thursday, March 25th with the Zoom meeting information.
• Online Registration via EventBrite
• Mail-In Registration Form
• The regular registration rate ($10) applies to everyone EXCEPT students high school, undergraduate, and graduate), high school teachers, retired and unemployed participants, and non-mathematician guests. Students (high school, undergraduate, and graduate), high school teachers, retired and unemployed participants, and non-mathematician guests can register for free.

Plenary Speakers

• James Sellers
  
  • University of Minnesota, Duluth
  • Secretary of the MAA
  • Revisiting What Euler and the Bernoullis Knew About Convergent Infinite Series
  • All too often in first-year calculus classes, conversations about infinite series stop with discussions about convergence or divergence. Such interactions are, unfortunately, not often illuminating or intriguing. Interestingly enough, Jacob and Johann Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler (and their contemporaries in the early 18th century) knew quite a bit about how to find the *exact* values of numerous families of convergent infinite series. In this talk, I will show two sets of *exact* results in this vein. The talk will be accessible to anyone interested in mathematics.
• Satyan Devadoss
  
  • University of San Diego
  • Math Mysteries at Burning Man
  • 
  • Rising 12 feet tall with an 18-foot wingspan, a 2-ton unfolding dodecahedron comes to life at Burning Man, the world's most influential large-scale sculpture showcase. The artwork is illuminated by 16,000 LEDs with an interior large enough to hold 15 people and fully-lined with massive mirrors. This interactive sculpture alludes to a tantalizing open problem in mathematics on unfolding polyhedra, tracing its origins back 500 years to the Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. We discuss the state-of-the-art for this geometric puzzle, consider solutions to some higher-dimensional unfolding analogs, and place this example in a larger quest to bring the edge of mathematical knowledge to the general public.

Section NExT Discussion

• Reflections on Pandemic Teaching Innovations: A discussion of some lessons learned by us during these unprecedented times
• Discussion Leaders: Justin Lambright (Anderson University) and Eric Reyes (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology)
• Moderator: Chris Caruvana (Indiana University Kokomo)

Student Workshop

• A Friendly Introduction to Spherical Trigonometry
• Presenters: Glen Van Brummelen (Trinity Western University) and Colin McKinney (Wabash College)
• In this workshop, we'll explore the exciting world of geometry and trigonometry on the sphere. Some things work the way you'd expect, but others are totally different from the Euclidean plane: the angles of a triangle, for example, always add up to more than 180 degrees! In this system, we'll look at the foundations of the geometry and trigonometry, and look at the surprising statement of the spherical version of Pythagoras' theorem. We'll also look at Napier's pentagramma mirificum (amazing pentagram) and motivate the true origin of logarithms.

Additional Information

• This meeting will also include the annual business meeting, announcements of teaching and service award winners, and contributed talks.

ICMC

• Typically, the ICMC takes place during the spring meeting of the Indiana Section of the MAA. Given the virtual format of this year's Spring Section Meeting, the 2021 ICMC will take place on Saturday, March 20th (a week before the Spring Section Meeting) on each team's home campus under the supervision of a local faculty supervisor. Awards will be announced the following weekend at the Spring Section Meeting.
• For additional information about the ICMC, visit the ICMC page.