A Few Serious and Not-So-Serious Things I Did as an Oliner

In four years at Olin, I did the following:

Palace of Promise

Throughout junior and senior year of high school, Olin was my top choice largely because of its curriculum. I wanted to be doing engineering, not just learning about it, and I appreciated the focus on engineering starting and ending with people. It was the community that eventually led to my decision to go to Olin, but it was the curriculum and education model that initially attracted me.

Olin is its People

I chose to come to Olin over my other options largely because of the small community and particularly how strong the relationships between students and professors seemed. So, I wanted to take a post to focus on how those relationships ended up shaping my four years at Olin.

Left: with Professor Troxell. Center: with Rehana. Right: with Aaron.

Top left: with R rising senior. Top center: with C and K, rising junior and sophomore. Bottom left: with J and T, both rising seniors. Bottom center: with Amelie, a wonderful roommate and suitemate. Right: with Rocco, rising junior.

Identity, Confidence, Community: My Olin Story in Five Graphs

It's been about a month since I graduated! I'll be writing some more general reflections, including one specifically about community, but I was inspired by a conversation with a friend to draw some graphs that I thought were interesting enough to share on their own.

There are five graphs: confidence as an engineer, confidence as a mathematician, identity as an engineer, identity as a mathematician, and sense of community.

The time axis is divided into semesters and summers. My first summer was spent on the Critical Language Azerbaijani program, my second was in Singapore doing chemical engineering research, and during my third summer I was at UCLA doing applied math research in the RIPS program. I was abroad at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics during my junior fall.

All the graphs are annotated, but the annotations are pretty small; click or zoom in to read them!

Reflections on Second Semester Senior Year Courses

I took Sustainable Design, SCOPE, Numerical Methods, and graph theory research this semester. I'll talk about SCOPE separately, but here are some thoughts on the others.

The Joy of the Joint Meetings

The Joint Mathematics Meetings are a large annual math conference, so named because they are the joint annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society (and have significant participation from several other societies/associations). This year was my eighth JMM, and I love them every year. JMM was last week, and some of my friends expressed confusion at my great enthusiasm for the meetings, so I thought I'd try to explain a bit.

Reflections on Senior Fall

I was originally enrolled in eighteen credits this semester, but after three or four weeks, I dropped down to fourteen. It was a decision I was pretty upset about because I dropped a class that I enjoyed and was taking for fun, but it was the right choice. I had underestimated how much time and effort grad school and scholarship/fellowship apps were going to take, and both SCOPE and Mechanical Design regularly took more than twelve hours a week each. I've had Olin classes take that much time before, but I'd never had two at once, and the fact that both were built around team projects (and thus team meetings) just made it worse. After I dropped BioTransport  (Transport in Biological Systems), some weeks were still rough, but I didn't constantly feel overwhelmed anymore. And between BioTransport and NLDC (Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos), dropping BioTransport was definitely the better choice.

Below the fold I'll talk about what I did this semester (apart from SCOPE, which is still in progress):

On Math

tl;dr: Maybe we should teach math as math.

I sent out an email earlier this semester looking for students to join the graph theory research group. Joseph and I are both graduating in May, so we want to have some non-graduating students in the group next semester.

I got thirteen replies. From Olin students, I got thirteen replies. I've had two people later talk to me expressing interest.

We have both math and coding projects next semester, and a few people are definitely more interested in the programming side. While many others are interested in both and some of them might lean coding, part of what would make the project cool for them is that they think the math is exciting, as well. So essentially, I sent out an email asking if anyone wanted to do math research without many direct applications, and more than four percent of Olin said yes. (And we excluded the 25-30% of the school graduating in December or May as well as the tenth or so that will be abroad/on leave next semester!)

I know that's not a huge percentage of Olin, but that's fifteen non-seniors who would like to make room in their schedule to do mathematics, mathematics that might not get anywhere, mathematics for which we don't yet have answers, new mathematics. And that's enough to make me think, even more than I already did, that we do Oliners a disservice when we hide math away.

Community

The past couple of  weeks have made me think about communities of which I've been a part. There are a lot of them, and often it's the people that end up being most important to me about a place or experience. Here are a few recent moments that have really highlighted community for me.

Thoughts on Mechanics of Solids and Structures and Math Activities

My fourth class this past semester was Mechanics of Solids and Structures, or MechSolids, which is a mechE requirement. I also did a lot of math related activities. Compared to last semester, I didn't feel like I did very much math this semester, but what I did do was pretty varied.

I'm going to be a senior?

My life is still mostly class projects (even more so now that MechSolids projects are about to start), though the weather is finally warming up, so I've also been spending time at Babson's baseball games. There are only three weeks of classes left, and registration was at the end of last week. It's a little weird to think that I'm already registering for senior year. Here's what I'll be up to this summer and next fall:

It's a Small World After All

About a month ago, my friends Amelie and Eleanor and I participated in the Mathematics Competition in Modeling (MCM). The contest is 96 hours long, and the final deliverables are a report and some short, non-technical piece of writing specific to the problem topic.

There were four problem options, and we went with Problem A:
The world medical association has announced that their new medication could stop Ebola and cure patients whose disease is not advanced. Build a realistic, sensible, and useful model that considers not only the spread of the disease, the quantity of the medicine needed, possible feasible delivery systems, locations of delivery, speed of manufacturing of the vaccine or drug, but also any other critical factors your team considers necessary as part of the model to optimize the eradication of Ebola, or at least its current strain. In addition to your modeling approach for the contest, prepare a 1-2 page non-technical letter for the world medical association to use in their announcement.

We ended up building two models to look at the problem on different scales. One model was of a district (and would be easily extendable to a country), and that model was focused on supply of the drug and distribution of medical workers. Instead of looking at individual people, we looked at percentages of the population moving among risk levels and susceptibility levels over time.

The other model was at a town level, and we focused on the connections among people and how a triage-like system of distributing the drug influenced disease spread and resistance within a community. For this model, I got to play around with graph theory! After reading some papers about networks and modeling spread of disease or information, we chose to go with a type of network structure called a small world model. In our implementation, each person in the community was represented by a vertex, and close relationships (the kind that would lead to a lot of contact even if someone were ill) were represented by edges. We gave each edge a weight between 0 and 1 to indicate how strong a connection it was. The small world part comes in from how we determined where to put edges. Each vertex had edges to a few vertices near it in a very regular pattern, and then we added in a set number of randomly determined edges. For example, say we had a community of 70 people, and we organized the 70 vertices in a circle. Then one possible setup like ours would have each vertex connected to two vertices immediately to its right and two vertices immediately to its left, and there would be a few random edges crossing through the center of the circle.

I spent most of my time working on the small world model and thinking about how to integrate the two models. I hadn't expected to get to do graph theory, so this was exciting! My research group published some spread papers a year or two before I joined, and I've seen a lot of presentations at math conferences over the years about spread and containment in various networks, but I'd never actually done any work in the area. Knowing what kinds of networks were possibilities and where to look for more information was really useful for the competition, and I feel more comfortable working with networks in general now.

We came to some cool conclusions from the graphs we got out of the models, and we were even able to use some of our user-centered design experience in interpreting the results. From a mathematical point of view, there's more information that I would have liked to know about our graphs, but at the time I wasn't entirely sure if that information would be relevant. We were pretty happy with our work, and Amelie and I are planning on competing again next year!

Spectral Theory

I've already written a fair bit about Inquiry Based Spectral Theory already, but it still deserves a post of its own. It's definitely the BSM class I'll miss the most.

Combinatorics and Topology

Extremal Combinatorics and Topology were my math classes at BSM that had the most fun homework and were generally the lowest stress. Here's a bit more about each:

If I Were At Expo

Rebecca Christianson, the Olin prof who organizes Expo at the end of every semester, sent out the email for Expo sign-ups today. Expo is the "end-of-semester celebration of student work," and all on-campus Oliners are required to present something each semester. I'm going to be in Budapest, not at Olin, so I'm not participating, but it made me think about what I would do for Expo were I somehow to be at Olin on December 19th.

A lot of Olin's classes lead to Expo-presentable work because they're project based, and many classes that aren't project based for most of the semester have final projects that are Expo-able. It's a little weird that I've only presented project work at one Expo. In fall 2012 I presented my last ModSim project, in spring and fall 2013 I used my graph theory research for Expo, and last spring I talked about my Passionate Pursuit. For the past three semesters, I've talked about either math or ballet.

So it shouldn't be surprising that if I had to come up with something for Expo this semester, it would probably concern math or ballet.

It's a little tricky, though, because my classes this semester have been very different from Olin classes. There are no projects. Even in Spectral Theory, my most Olin-ish class, nothing I'm doing is original. I'm very proud of the work I've done here, and I've worked harder than I generally work in a semester at Olin, but it's all proving known statements or solving problems with known answers because that's how one learns mathematics. There are lots of things I've proven or seen proven that I think are really cool, and I've considered trying to use a few of them for Midnight Mathematicians talks in the future, but giving that kind of presentation isn't really in the spirit of Expo.

That brings me to ballet. I've seen a lot of ballet here, more in a single semester than I usually see in a year. In Bratislava and Prague I saw two very unusual productions of Romeo and Juliet, and I could easily compare them to each other and to more standard choreographies. I also saw unusual versions of Carmen and Coppelia, so instead of focusing on R&J I could talk about new choreographies of traditional ballets, or I could add in La Sylphide and Merry Widow and explore the structure of story ballets from different time periods.

I think it's a little weird, though not necessarily surprising, that one of the ways I chose to spend my free time would yield at least three potential Expo projects, whereas the hundreds of hours of mathematics I've done wouldn't translate into anything appropriate for Expo. Expo works as a requirement at Olin because of the nature of Olin. BSM is very different, and trying to do Expo this semester with an Olin mindset would be difficult because of that difference.

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things

I planned on listing a few of my favorite things in Budapest. The list I ended up writing is a little longer than "a few."

Halfway Through

Four semesters down, four semesters to go.

I'm halfway through my education at Olin. When I started this blog, I intended to document my experience in the experiment that is Olin. So far, I've mostly done this course by course, and this seemed like a good point to stop and look over the past two years as a whole.

Reflections on Semester 4: Thermodynamics

Despite the fact that I never said much about it here, Thermo was my favorite class this semester. Since I'm a mechanical engineer because I love thermal-fluids, this wasn't really a surprise. The reason I didn't mention it much was that it was pretty low-key, particularly compared to UOCD.

Below the fold are my thoughts on Thermo!

Thoughts on Sophomore Year Math Activities

It's earlier than I normally start writing reflection posts, but this one covers the entire school year, not just this semester, and everything is in project mode now. This is all about math related things -- NINJAing, online assisting, graph theory, and Putnam!

A Mathematical Festival

I spent last week at the Joint Math Meetings in Baltimore. The JMM is an annual gathering of thousands of mathematicians, and this was the sixth time I've attended. I always love it. People who do math gather from all around the world, and to me it always feels like a big festival. People talk about their research, their teaching, and their projects. They see old friends and meet new ones. All the publishers come with books and software, and there's even a mathematical art exhibit.

So what did I specifically do last week?

1. Jacques and I presented our research! Jacques presented work from one of the group's 2012 papers, and I presented the result from the paper we published last spring. Our talks were well attended, and several people asked questions, both of which were exciting! We were in a session on extremal and structural problems in graph theory, so we also heard some talks on topics closely related to our own work.

2. I went to a lot of talks. Maybe around 50? I love going to talks because even when they're short and don't go deep into details, I learn so much. Most of these talks were ten or twenty-five minute research presentations on graph theory and combinatorics, which are the areas in which I'm most comfortable, but I also saw some talks on number theory, mathematical modeling, mathematical fiber arts (crocheting polyominoes, for example), partial differential equations, and the impact of summer math camps. I went to two large lectures. The first focused on topological graph theory, and the second was about math in animation and computer graphics.

3. I talked to people. There was a Mathcamp reunion, so I saw campers and staff from my two years at camp and met people from other years. I had a couple of really good conversations with Mathcamp staff about math and engineering. I also saw people I've met through Research Science Institute and Math Prize for Girls. I talked to some of the people who were at lots of the graph theory sessions, I met a couple of Wellesley students, and I even met someone while looking through books in the exhibits! Talking to new people is something I haven't done very well at previous JMMs, and even if I wasn't great at it this year, I was definitely better.

4. I bought two books! All the book publishers come to the meetings and have fantastic books on sale. After going through the exhibits a couple of times, I ended up with a list of thirteen interesting books, and I ended up buying two. They're both related to partial differential equations, specifically fluid dynamics, and I'm very excited to read them!

5. I ate a lot of good food. The meetings were in Baltimore, which meant delicious crab. I had crab cakes, crab soup, and shrimp and salmon stuffed with crab. The Mathcamp reunion was at a Turkish restaurant, and eating there felt like being back in Azerbaijan. My father and I found a place right on the harbor called Lenny's Deli which served good omelets, so we went there for breakfast most days.

All of these are the ways I love the JMM.