The 2025 Distinguished Lectures are coming up! Our speaker is Jordan Ellenberg from the University of Wisconsin. He is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the NYTimes Best-selling author of “How Not to be Wrong” and “Shape”.
He will give 3 lectures:
Colloquium: Friday, March 28, 3:30pm (PSB 217) What does artificial intelligence have to offer mathematics?
Public Lecture: Monday, March 31, 5:30pm (PSB 217) From malaria to ChatGPT: the birth and strange life of the random walk
Seminar: Wednesday, April 2, 3:30pm (Keller 303) Smyth’s conjecture and a non-deterministic Hasse principle
As part of a project for their Math 100 course–taught by math faculty members Monique Chyba and Sarah Widiasih Post and gradaute students Moriah Aberle, Shubham Joshi, John Dukes, Christa Gogue– undergraduate students worked to combat pollution in in the Ala Wai Canal in Honolulu. In mid-October, students made 1972 genki balls, which are balls of dense soil that contains nutrients and beneficial microorganisms, guided by their professors, TA’s, and volunteers from the Genki Ala Wai Project. In class, students performed computations with scientific notation and analyzed data to understand the positive effects that these genki balls could have on the ecosystem of the canal. The balls were released into Ala Wai Canal on November 9, and the event was covered by UH News and by KITV.
“Quantitative reasoning and critical thinking are incredibly important skills to develop to understand and adapt to environmental as well as societal changes,” said Professor Monique Chyba. “Math 100 is designed to teach those skills in context, students are exploring how to mathematics are interconnected with relevant aspects of their life regardless of their majors. The Genki balls project served as a bridge to expose the students to the benefits of a mathematical approach to maximize the impact of actions in environmental issues. “
Four Maui High students, with guidance from University of Hawaiʻi professors, have created an experiment to measure how plastic degrades under ultraviolet light.
It was selected by the Cubes in Space program — a competitive, international opportunity for students to send their experiments on a high-altitude NASA balloon flight.
The carefully designed and highly researched experiments must each fit into a tiny 4 by 4 by 4-centimeter cube.
Giving back to Maui keiki was at the heart of an educational trip to the Valley Isle by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Mathematics faculty members and graduate students.
Jack Johnson playing a game with a young participant.
Professor Monique Chyba, Associate Professor Yuriy Mileyko and Assistant Professor Chuang Xu, with graduate students Alan Tong and Sam Glickman, visited Nāpili Noho, a community based emergency distribution hub at Nāpili Park that is helping those affected by the devastating Lahaina wildfire. They conducted math activities during a Christmas carnival-style event held on December 16.
Ninth and 10th graders learning about graph theory.
Prior to their visit to West Maui, the UH Mānoa team interacted with about 40 high school students (grades 9–11) at UH Maui College. The students are part of TRiO Upward Bound, an engaging educational program that prepares low-income, first-generation high school students for college. The Maui students learned about graph theory, which is the study of graphs, that has cutting-edge applications such as social and traffic networks, optimal routing for emergency response, and molecular epidemiology.
Assistant Professor Chuang Xu teaching Upward Bound students about the Fleury’s algorithm.
This effort is part of a RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation on trauma-informed STEM education. Chyba and Mileyko are co-principal investigators on the grant
