Sonia Kovalesky Days, 2022, 2023, and 2024
Most springs Dartmouth runs a fun-filled day of mathematics with hands-on workshops and talks for middle and high school female students and their teachers, both women and men. Originally started and funded by the Association for Women in Mathematics, The purpose of the day is to encourage young women to continue their study of mathematics and to assist the teachers of female mathematics students.
I have participated in this each time it was held. The below lists my contributions each year.
2024: co-organized the event, and co-led a workshop with Anna Vasenina and Caroline Hammond on probability and the Multi-Armed Bandit problem. In this activity, students sampled marbles one at a time (without replacement) from one of two bags to estimate the proportion of yellow marbles (“mining for gold”). They had 10 or 20 draws, and tried to maximize the number of yellow marbles drawn. We used this to provide intuiton for the central limit theorem / law of large numbers, and introduce the problem of exploration vs exploitation (whether to stick with the mine that produced the most gold, but may be empty now, or try a new mine, which has no guarantees about its quality.
Description: We can never predict the real world with total certainty, so to make decisions we use the math of probability to determine the best action in any circumstance. This workshop will introduce sampling and the expected value with a fun puzzle, which can be applied to many important problems like investment portfolio optimization and medication research and development.
2023: co-led a workshop on mathematical games with Travis Russell and Kasia Warburton, presenting on non-transitive dice. Students collected data on rolling pairs of dice, seeing there was no best die, then saw the math to prove this.
Description: Have you ever wondered if math can make you better at playing games? In this session, we will study how to use math to improve your odds of winning a variety of games, from rolling dice to guessing which door on a game show hides the grand prize! Along the way we will learn how to mathematically determine foolproof winning strategies for games and encounter a few mathematical paradoxes as well.
2022: I assisted fellow graduate student Yanbing Gu in a presentation on the four color theorem and its generalizations to higher genus surfaces realized through crochet.