Real World Cryptography

June 10, 2016July 25, 20161 Comment

By: Shai Caspin, Natalie Bowers, Bryana Dorsey, Nia Pierce, and Cana Perry

Cryptography is the act of encrypting and decrypting codes. It’s used to pass secret messages and keep outsiders from accessing information. Math is used to help encrypt codes using different methods. One common methods is to use RSA encryptions, which uses prime numbers and mod functions to make deciphering impossible. RSA encryptions are so successful since factoring large numbers into their prime factors is incredibly difficult, and there is yet a way to do so quickly and efficiently.

We were all very interested in learning more about cryptography since it incorporates everyday math with real-world problems and situations.

Continue reading →

Monte Carlo and the Coding Tale

June 15, 2016July 25, 2016Leave a comment

By: Michelle Chen, Cameron Farrar, Laura O’Sullivan, and Cat Bassett

Introduction

Everything we do in life has a chance. That chance may come from picking the right card, picking a certain marble out of a bag or maybe deciding to give the first person who walks through a random door $100. Essentially,each chance has a certain trade-off of benefits. Often times we think about the chances as something will happen over the chance of something else taking place as we weigh possible outcomes. This is called risk analysis. One of the ways we can determine risk is we can use Monte Carlo simulations to replicate real life situations a large number of times in order to observe the long-term patterns without having the complications (cost, labor, materials, etc.) of manual repetition.

Continue reading →

Quantum Mechanics

July 2, 2018August 6, 2018Leave a comment

By Izzy Cox, Divya Iyer, Wgoud Mansour, Ashleigh Sico, and Elizabeth Whetzel.

Quantum Mechanics is the physics of molecular and microscopic particles. However, it has applications in everyday life as well. If someone asked you if a human was a particle or a wave, what would you think? What about a ball? What about light? Not so easy now, is it? It turns out that all of those things, and in fact, everything around us, can be expressed in physics as both a particle and a wave. This might seem a little unbelievable, but for now, let’s start with the basics.

Classical Physics

Although Classical Physics sounds like a complicated idea, it’s the most simple branch of physics. It’s what you think of when someone says “physics”. Classical Physics lays the basic foundation to Quantum Physics with a few basic laws.

Continue reading →

Network Science @ WPI

July 7, 2022July 29, 2022Leave a comment

By Maddie, Nitya, Amel, Alyssa

Introduction

We were part of this year’s Girls Talk Math program. This was a great opportunity that we came across in different ways. It has helped us learn about different math topics that we may not have had the opportunity to discover on our own. This topic may seem boring at first, but they all have their individual charms. The topic we chose was Network Science, and together we got to learn about things such as coding on Python.

Continue reading →

Dr. Amanda Ruiz: Blazing Trails with Math

July 2, 2021July 7, 2021Leave a comment

By Aynsley, Carrington, Susan, Tehya, and others

In recent years, more and more women are using math to tackle serious social issues such as gender inequality and lack of diversity in STEM careers. These trailblazers pave the way for the newest generation of women and minorities in STEM, inspiring them to become active for what they believe in. One such example is seen within the field of mathematics: Dr. Amanda Ruiz of the University of San Diego.

Continue reading →

Classification of Surfaces

July 2, 2018August 6, 2018Leave a comment

By Ayanna Blake, Lisa Oommen*, Myla Marve, Tamarr Moore, Caylah Vickers, and Lily Zeng.

*Lisa helped the group work through the problem set but was unfortunately unable to attend camp during the blog writing.

The Girls Talk Math camp is about female high school students from different places who discuss mathematics, mathematicians, and theories. We were split up into groups and were assigned different math topics to learn. Our topic was classification of surfaces, which is listed under the umbrella topic of abstract geometry.

We thought the surfaces project was very interesting and cool to learn about, because it introduced us to college level math and allowed us to understand different parts of geometry. Along with gaining knowledge of surfaces, we also got to learn about other groups topics. Campers presented their topics on the last day and helped us to perceive the significance of the different subjects.

Continue reading →

Network Science

June 30, 2017July 3, 20171 Comment

By Cameron Farrar, Elizabeth Gross, Shiropa Noor, and Rebecca Rozansky

Girls Talk Math was an eyeopening experience to a brand new world of mathematics. Over the past two weeks, we have been introduced to multiple topics and related professions. We learned about: quantum mechanics, surface classification, knot theory, computing & dynamics, elliptic curve cryptography, RSA encryption, special relativity and the most interesting of them all- NETWORK SCIENCE!

During our time at Girls Talk Math, we learned about the wonders of network science and graph theory. The difficult part of this otherwise enjoyable journey? Mathematica. Mathematica is a software created to make you suffer, especially if you already know computer science (AHEM BECKY). Basically, we created graphs, did calculations and got confused on Mathematica. Typing out all the commands took ages. We’ll show you some examples as we go through the different concepts we explored. Don’t worry- once you spend some time on Mathematica, you’ll get used to it.

Continue reading →

Special Relativity

June 30, 2017Leave a comment

By Katie Clark, Tori Dunston, Kelly Fan, Abrianna Macklin, and McKenna Vernon

Picture a hummingbird. At any moment, it can go in any of the three dimensions it is a part of. So, it could go up and down, forwards and backwards, or left and right. But, one thing that is not taken into account is time. As it moves through space, it is also occupying time. However, we’re not used to thinking about our world in a four dimensional sense. But, as the movement of the pigeon progresses, so does time. This is known as the relationship between space and time, and it is the primary foundation that special relativity is built on. So, at any given moment, it actually can move in four dimensions at once. This can be simply modeled using a spacetime diagram.

lightcone3

Continue reading →

Number Systems

July 2, 2018August 6, 2018Leave a comment

By Miranda Copenhaver, Nancy Hindman*, Efiotu Jagun, and Gloria Su.

*Nancy helped the group work through the problem set but was unfortunately unable to attend camp during the blog writing.

Number systems are how we represent numbers like 1, 32, and 75. We use the base ten (decimal) system for our numbers most of the time. It’s called base ten because it uses ten digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. But what if I told you that 1001101 and 4D both mean seventy-seven? Crazy, right? There are countless number systems, but today we will be focusing on two: hexadecimal (base sixteen) and binary (base two)!

As we’ve said before, the binary system is base two; it only uses 0 and 1. Since only 1 or 0 can be used, the placement of each digit is important. Computers use binary to store and transfer information. It is used in communication (Morse code, braille) and everything electronic like computers, lights, calculators, MP3s, MIDI, JPEG, etc.

Continue reading →

Mathematical Epidemiology

July 2, 2018August 6, 2018Leave a comment

By Camilla Fratta, Ananya Jain, Sydney Mason, Gabby Matejowsky, and Nevaeh Pinkney*.

*Nevaeh helped the group work through the problem set but was unfortunately unable to attend camp during the blog writing.

Mathematical Epidemiology explores the realm of mathematics applied to public health. It relies on modeling to use known information about certain scenarios regarding the spread of diseases and then uses it to predict future outcomes. By the end of the problem set, our group learned about the challenging process that comes with trying to predict population sizes in order to control the spreading of diseases. The equations that are faced in this branch of mathematics are at the heart of mathematical modeling.

Mathematical Models and Modeling

A mathematical model is an equation used to predict or model the most likely results to occur in a real-world situation. We used these types of equations to model the spread of a disease in a population, tracking the flow of populations from susceptible to infected to recovered. In real life scenarios, there are too many variables to fully account for, so we only were able to place a few in our equations. This made the models less accurate, but at the same time very useful to us in our problem set. They gave us a good idea of how things worked in an actual epidemic and helped us to understand what mathematical modeling really is.

Continue reading →