Elmira College Hosts Mathematical Association of America Conference

On October 19-20, 2012, Elmira College hosted the Fall Meeting of the Seaway Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The meeting brought in mathematics faculty and undergraduate students from throughout upstate and western New York, northern Pennsylvania, and Canada, with a total of 180 participants in the conference

On Friday night, there banquet at the Holiday Inn, where the guest speaker was Jerome Epstein from Polytechnic University. Dr. Epstein spoke about a set of assessments he has developed to gauge the conceptual understanding of students in lower-level mathematics courses. Afterwards, Melanie Zachritz ’15 and Brianna Lindsay ’15 represented Elmira College in a Math Jeopardy contest.

The Saturday portion of the conference met on campus. It began in the Kolker Auditorium with a welcome from President Champagne, followed by morning talks from Doug Ensley of Shippensburg University, John Ringland of the University at Buffalo, and Jamar Pickreign of SUNY Fredonia, who delivered the Section's Randolph Lecture

After a buffet luncheon at Mackenzie's, the afternoon was devoted to breakout sessions: sixteen contributed papers by faculty; twelve by students; and computer lab sessions for Project NeXt and WebWorks. Two Elmira College students presented papers on their research: Samuel Pine ’14 presented "Bounds for Elements of the Degree Sequence of an Unknown Vertex Set in a Balanced Bipartite Graph"; while Patrick Reilly ’13 presented "Triangles, Tetrahedrons, and 'Tricky' Election Outcomes." Both of these papers were result of work done during the Elmira College Summer Research Program.

Faculty member Charlie Jacobson, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, also presented a paper: "Using Medians to Estimate Means in Bipartite Data."

“Conferences like this are valuable to us, in that they raise the profile of Elmira College in the academic community,” states Dr. Charlie Jacobson. “It is possible for us to host such a conference only because of all the hard work done in the background.” The Mathematics department along with administrators, staff, and students worked tirelessly to put this conference together, and thanks all those who helped make this important event possible.