Quantum Mechanics

June 30, 2017July 3, 2017Leave a comment

By Kathryn Benedict, Olivia Fugikawa, Denna Huang, and Eleanor McAdon

Intro

Quantum mechanics is a subfield of physics. Like with any other major area of study, physics is divided into many smaller categories. Classical physics is the main one, which includes Newton’s Laws of Motion and basic principles of mechanics, like inertia and friction. Things get weird when you delve into modern physics, which includes special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Special relativity deals with particles moving at the speed of light, general relativity works with incredibly massive objects and quantum mechanics is the physics of subatomic particles. This is what we worked on for the past two weeks and what our blog post is about!

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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.

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Elliptic Curve Cryptography

July 12, 2019September 2, 2019Leave a comment

by Alana Drumgold*, Lauren Flowers, Emily Huang, Tamarr Moore*, and Ashleigh Sico.

*Alana and Tamarr helped the group work through the problem set but were unfortunately unable to attend camp during the blog writing.

For years, people have been trying to find a way to send secret messages. This may have been easy to do in the ancient times of the Roman Empire, where you could write a message, and then hand-deliver it to your recipient. This way, you could be certain that nobody else could intercept it. However, this becomes a lot more difficult in today’s online tech-driven world. People no longer hand-deliver letters; rather, we email or text our friends. So how do we make sure that nobody else can intercept your text message as it travels the internet before finally landing on your friend’s cell-phone? The answer is found in cryptography, a technology that is becoming more and more important in today’s world. Today, we are going to focus on one particular form of cryptography: elliptic curve cryptography.

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Alice Silverberg: A Snapshot of her Mathematical Career

July 2, 2021July 7, 2021Leave a comment

By: Claudia, Meghan, Elizabeth, Yunjing

Born on October 6, 1958, Alice Silverberg is a 1979 Harvard University graduate who then received her master’s degree and Ph.D from Princeton University under the supervision of Goro Shimura. Her academic career began at Ohio State University where she worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Mathematics from 1984 to 1996. In 2004, she moved to the University of California, Irvine as a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. For the next twenty years, Silverberg gave lectures at universities around the world and served as an active member of the nominating committee of the American Mathematical Society. Since 2008, Silverberg has worked as an editor for the Association for Women in Mathematics. She is also the writer of her own blog, Alice’s Adventures in Numberland, where she addresses prominent social issues of sexism and discrimination in her field.

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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.

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Schoolhouse Rock—Dr. Candice Price Rocks!

July 2, 2021July 7, 2021Leave a comment

By Clara, Ceren, Zoe, and Jess

Dr. Candice Price had always been good at math. But when her third-grade teacher presented “Schoolhouse Rock!–Multiplication Rock!” to her class, her passion truly began. The 30-minute multiplication lesson inspired her everlasting enthusiasm for mathematics. It is this inspiration that drove her to be the accomplished female mathematician that she is today.

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Intro to Relativity

June 10, 2016July 25, 2016Leave a comment

By: Miranda Copenhaver, Chloe Nash, Wanda Wilkins, Lauren Behringer, and Jazmin Santillan C.

Throughout this week, we have worked through multiple problems dealing with both classical mechanics and special relativity. We found the main difference between classical mechanics and special relativity to be the assumptions made about time as a constant. This is what we mean:

In classical mechanics it is assumed that time is a constant that is observed the same for all viewers.
In special relativity time cannot be taken as a constant. Because the speed of light is the same for all observers, time-dilation occurs.

So, if you are getting a little lost it’s completely normal. We have a couple of examples of both classical mechanics and special relativity below:

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Network Science

July 2, 2018August 9, 2018Leave a comment

By Myla James, Shania Johnson, Maya Mukerjee, and Savitha Saminathan.

Graph Theory

Here’s some definitions to help you understand our assignment:

Nodes – vertex/point.
Edges – lines connecting vertices.
Adjacent – two nodes (vertices) are adjacent if they share an edge (line).
Degree – number of edges adjacent to a particular node.

We started this problem set with learning about the difference between connected and disconnected graphs.

Connected Graph – able to travel from one node to any other through its edges.
Disconnected graph – more complex; it has components.
Components – parts of the graphs that are connected.

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RSA Encryption Cryptography

June 30, 2017July 3, 2017Leave a comment

By Divya Aikat, Helena Harrison, Annie Qin, and Quinn Shanahan

The definition of cryptography is the art of writing and solving code. However, over the last two weeks, we learned so much more than just this textbook explanation. While working together within our team, we explored many different aspects behind cryptography. By building off our individual strengths, we prepared ourselves for higher level mathematics. The following is a synopsis of the progress we’ve made over the past two weeks.

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Number Systems

July 12, 2019September 2, 2019Leave a comment

by Alysia Davis, Alyssa Drumgold, Pascale Gomez, Delaney Washington, and Auden Wolfe.

Intro to Number Systems

As children we grew up counting in the base ten system (1, 2, 3, etc). However, base ten is only one of many numerical systems. Over these past to weeks at Girls Talk Math at UNC, our task was to explore other number systems that are not as frequently used as the base 10 system, specifically binary and hexadecimal number systems.

Binary

The exact definition of binary is related to using a system of numerical notation that has 2 rather than 10 as a base. This means only two single digits are used, 0 and 1.

Binary is used for data storage. Binary basically makes it easier for computer processors to understand and interpret incoming information/instructions.

Binary was first discussed by Gottfried Leibniz in 1689 but binary numerical systems were not put to use until a binary converter was created hundreds of years later. The binary system was officially implemented just before the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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