For Honor!

As of last night, Olin has a new Honor Code.

About a year ago, the student body voted to put a sunset clause on the Honor Code, largely because a lot of people felt disconnected from the code. So this year, we elected an Honor Code Revew/Rewrite Committee (HCRC). They held a lot of meetings throughout the year, starting with ideation and comments on the old Honor Code, and then they went through a lot of drafts and got comments on those drafts. At one point the committee taped copies of the old Honor Code and the proposed Honor Code to the door of every single room in both dorms -- and then sent a meeting request to the entire school to discuss the draft.

Last night's Town Hall Meeting was the result of all of that work. In order to vote, we needed quorum -- at least half of the student body. We ended up with about 205 of the 325-ish students living on campus. After two hours of presentations, discussions, and voting, we approved the new Core Values and removed the sunset clause.

The new Core Values are below the fold:

Beavers Baseball

I'm from a baseball family. My father umpires high school and college ball, and I've been watching baseball on tv and in person for as long as I can remember (I definitely remember games in the Houston Astrodome). So when I found out that Babson has a baseball team and that the field is closer to Olin's campus than it is to the rest of Babson, I was very excited. And yesterday was opening day!

The game was at Babson's field, but Worcester Polytechnic (WPI) was the home team, which made the scoreboard a little confusing. The scoreboard lists "Visitor" and "Babson," but yesterday the "Visitor" score was Babson's and the "Babson" score was WPI. And Babson won, 19-6!

The Visitor score is actually Babson's. Hooray Beavers!

Reasons I love Math

1. Different subfields connect to each other in awesome ways. I'm doing graph theory research this semester with a group on campus. Most of my graph theory experience is in one subfield (edge coloring), and the group does work in another subfield (vertex labeling). Within my first couple of weeks with the group, we solved a vertex labeling problem by changing it to an edge coloring problem and solving that, which I thought was really cool.

2. It explains weird phenomena. This past Saturday night was the first ever Midnight Mathematicians at which the speaker was a professor. Midnight Math meets every other Saturday night (ish) at 11:59 pm, and we all dress classily, eat cheese, and listen to someone talk about math! This weekend, Professor John Geddes talked about work he's done on nonlinear dynamics of fluids, particularly related to blood flowing in microvessels. The blood sometimes does weird things, like change directions with no change in conditions, and the mathematics can actually explain this, which is so awesome. (I in no way mean to imply that math is only cool if it is useful. I've done and enjoyed too much model theory and logic to think that.)

3. And finally, it leads to exchanges like this:
(In Partial Differential Equations on Friday, talking about the wave equation on the half line. Aaron is the professor.)
Student: "That's why we can't make a semi-infinite guitar!"
Aaron: "That's why we wouldn't want to. The finiteness of the universe is why we can't."