Science Days: 2023, 2024, and 2025
Most springs Dartmouth graduate students from all STEM departments hold a day of activities for local elementary through high school students and their families to come learn about science.
I have participated in this each time it was held. The below lists my contributions each year.
2025: Organized and co-led an activity with postdoctoral researchers on paradoxes of infinity. There are a lot of these, so we printed and cut out copies of nine different slips with a question about infinity and QR code to online resources explaining the answer. We also wrote some notes for ourselves to explain the concepts. We also had some 3D printed fractal iteration for students to explore, rectangles with area the geometric series 1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16+… to discuss convergent sums, colored blocks to illustrate hilbert’s hotel, and dice to roll for the infinite monkey and ABRACADABRA theorems.
2024: Organized and co-led an activity with graduate students Benjamin Shapiro and James Schmidt on Error Correcting Codes. We introduced binary, and the 4,7-Hamming Code. Participants played a game of telephone with the code words to demonstrate how errors could be corrected.
2023: co-led a workshop with graduate student Grant Molnar and Post Doc Longmei Shu, on the game of Hackenbush and the Surreal numbers. We handed out packets for participants to learn the rules, and how to associate game states to numbers. Further references are:
- A website where you can play Hackenbush interactively and make your own games.
- Two sets of notes about the math behind this game.
- A short story explaining another way to construct the Surreal numbers:
- A Youtube video explaining this game.
