section meetings
2024 Mathfest
Instead of our usual fall meeting, our section will participate in the MAA Mathfest on August 7-10.
Spring 2025 IN-KY-OH Tri-state meeting
Steven Wilkinson (wilkinson@nku.edu) will be the local organizer at Northern Kentucky University.
Fall 2025
The Fall 2025 meeting will take place at Taylor University. The local organizer will be Derek Thompson.
Spring 2024
The Spring 2024 meeting will take place at Marian University on April 5-6, 2024. Matt DeLong will be the local organizer.
Travel Information
Resources:
Marian University directions to campus and campus map
Annotated map of parking lots and buildings we will use.
Parking pass for the parking lots north and southeast of Marian Hall.
Parking and Travel Directions:
The parking pass works for either the parking lot north of Marian Hall (building 21 on the campus map) or southeast from Marian Hall / south of Norman Center (building 25 on the campus map).
Handicap permit spaces – there are handicap spaces in either lot mentioned above.
Accessible building entrances – marked on the campus map with triangle A’s.
if there are no more spots available in the lots mentioned above (particularly for Friday afternoon), there is overflow parking available at the Indy Cycloplex Velodrome. A shuttle runs to campus from this lot based on the schedule available at this link.
Relevant Buildings:
Marian Hall - ICMC orientation, welcome, plenary
E. S. Witchger School of Engineering Center - contributed talks, ICMC workshop
Alumni Hall - banquet, awards, plenary
Section NExT Panel
Recent Technological Advances and the Changing Classroom
Moderator: Tyler Billingsley
Panelists: Amish Mishra, Olga Scrivner, Naama Lewis, Matt Boelkins
Abstract: You may have heard the sentiment that all we need to do mathematics is our mind and something to write with. In fact, many mathematicians still prefer to use chalk to conduct their classes. This classic approach has worked for centuries, but as technology continues to move and develop, we are presented with new resources for educating the next generation of mathematicians. This panel looks to survey some of these advances and spark conversations about the best ways to reach students who are saturated with the technology of today.
Plenary Speakers:
Talea L. Mayo
Weathering the Storm: Using Math to Understand Climate Change Impacts on Hurricane Storm Surge Risk
Talea Mayo is a computational mathematician with expertise in the development and application of numerical hydrodynamic models for coastal hazards. She specializes in hurricane storm surge modeling, including their use for the investigation of climate change impacts on coastal flood risk. She also has expertise in statistical data assimilation methods for state and parameter estimation. She has recently expanded her work to include coastal erosion and the impacts of sustainable resilience efforts. She earned her B.S. in Mathematics from Grambling State University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Emory University, and was recently awarded the Early-Career Research Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences Gulf Research Program and the Early Career Faculty Innovator Award by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She is a fierce advocate of accessible, inclusive science and education of all people, and spends her free time chasing marathon PRs and toddlers.
Matt Boelkins
Interactive, Accessible, Free, and More: how open-source textbooks are changing the teaching and learning of mathematics.
The mathematics community finds itself at the forefront of an exciting movement that seeks to ensure every student has free access to the learning resources they need to be successful. In the last decade: a significant number of authors have made their textbooks and class materials free and open-source; a new publishing language has made creating high-quality, accessible textbooks easier than ever; a new markup language offers instructors and authors the means to generate interactive exercises for students that offer students immediate feedback; and a new learning engineering analytics platform offers textbooks that students can log into and have their work tracked and saved. We’ll briefly discuss the history of the open educational resources movement in mathematics, share a range of exciting recent developments (including the conversion of open-source textbooks to Braille), discuss the promises we see for the future, and point participants to a vibrant, engaging set of resources they can start using immediately with students.
Matt Boelkins is Professor of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1998. He earned his PhD from Syracuse University, MS from Western Washington University, and BS from Geneva College.
Professor Boelkins has been recognized with several teaching-related honors, including the 2016 Michigan Association of State Universities’ Distinguished Professor of the Year and GVSU's Glenn A. Niemeyer Award. Throughout his career, he has been an avid practitioner of the scholarship of teaching and learning of mathematics and has worked to promote its practice through scholarly papers, conference presentations, and the journal PRIMUS (Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies), which he has served as Editor-in-Chief since 2020.
Professor Boelkins is the author or co-author of four textbooks, including the free, open-source Active Calculus (single variable) available at https://activecalculus.org. Active Calculus promotes an active learning approach to calculus through a sequence of student-driven activities, rather than via worked examples. He leads a community of over 500 users of the textbook through an online user group, and he regularly participates in conferences and workshops devoted to free, open-source textbooks.
Deborah Kent
Deborah Kent is a Reader in History of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews. Her research on 19th- and early-20th-century mathematical sciences has involved the circulation of mathematics in periodicals, mathematical biology, and solar eclipse expeditions. During the late 19th-century, high-stakes astronomical expeditions involved a range of individuals and organizations, whose collective experience helped to grow and sustain mathematical communities in the US. Connections forged beneath the Sun’s shadow sustained networks of communication and set precedent for government funding to support mathematical activity. On Monday, 8 April 2024, a total solar eclipse will be visible across North America, including directly over Indianapolis. This talk will explore some of the triumphs and tribulations encountered by 19th-century scientists that will provide context for and connection to the 21st-century experience of eclipse totality.
DONATE
Please consider making a contribution (of any size). Thank you for any support you can provide!
Fall 2023
The Fall 2023 Meeting will happen at the University of Notre Dame on October 7th. Kathryn Mulholland (kmulholland at nd.edu) will be the local organizer.
If you have any questions about accessibility issues for the upcoming meeting, contact the local organizer.
Plenary Speaker
Dr. Dominic Klyve
Dominic Klyve (KLEE-vee) is a Professor of Mathematics at Central Washington University. He is the author of more than 50 papers in number theory, the history of mathematics and science, and applied statistics. Klyve is a PI on $1.5 Million TRIUMPHS grant, which promotes the use of primary sources in the teaching of mathematics. He was a 2014 winner of the MAA’s Alder Award, a national teaching award for young faculty who have a demonstrated impact within and beyond the classroom. He currently serves as editor of the College Mathematics Journal. During 2021 he is on leave from his university to work as “Lead Polymath” for Know Labs, a Seattle tech start-up.
Dr.
Juanita Pinzón Caicedo
Juanita was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia and lived there until she moved to the US to pursue postgraduate studies. She got her PhD in Mathematics at Indiana University under the supervision of Prof. Paul Kirk. After grad school she was a postdoctoral fellow at UGA, NC State University, and at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. She has been at the University of Notre Dame since 2020. She studies 3- and 4-manifolds, and also knots and the surfaces they bound in the 4-ball. Her preferred tools come from gauge theory and Floer homologies. She has also in the past studied the theory of trisections of 4-manifolds with boundary.
Section NexT Panel
Topic: Mentoring Students for Non-Academic Careers
Moderator: Justin Lambright
Panelists: Rick Laugesen, Kyle Claassen, and Shane Leib
Poster Presentations
The student poster prestation will be held in the Hurley lounge.
Hotel block:
Arrival Date: October 6, 2023
Departure Date: October 8, 2023
6 double standard & 6 king standard
$102/night plus tax
Guest reserves/pays themselves. Cutoff date is 9/20
Reservation under "MAA Sectional Meeting"
Lunch:
Chopped salad - cucumber, cherry tomato, olive, salami, pickled pepper, ricotta salata, romaine, roasted garlic vinaigrette
Garden salad - mixed greens, heirloom tomatoes, cucumber, shaved radish, pickled red onion, marinated chickpeas, toasted sunflower seeds, lemon shallot vinaigrette
Farfalle pasta - basil pesto
Rigatoni pasta - tomato sauce, meatballs
Grilled Chicken Breast - chicken jus, roasted garlic, parsley
Italian Sausage - peppers and onions
Succotash - a seasonal vegetable dish
Garlic bread
Chef’s Selection Assorted Bars - brownie, lemon, chocolate pecan, caramel apple, and other assortments as available
Tech capabilities of Hayes-Healy Hall/Hurley Hall:
Every room has a desktop, document camera, projector, class camera, and blackboard. Zoom is installed on each computer.
Parking & Registration
The primary visitor lots are on the east side of the Walsh Family Hall of Architecture (South side of campus). Additional visitor parking areas are located in the Baseball, Compton and Joyce Lots. These lots are circled in red on the attached campus map. (Parking is free during evenings and weekends.)
Registration will in the hall of the Hurley building near the lounge.
See map below: red marks parking and blue marks buildings.
Donate
The section would like to once again support an Indiana Section NExT fellow, who will be required to teach at an Indiana institution. ( In 2018, the section supported such a fellow; thank you for your support then!) . The executive board has pledged $1500 toward the support of an Indiana Section Fellow, if the section can raise the remaining funds needed. Combined with donations of $346 currently earmarked for a Section NExT fellow, we have $1846 available to support a fellow.
While the total cost of supporting a fellow has increased to $3000 an anonymous donor has stepped forward and will match every contribution from section members and Fall meeting participants through the end of the Fall meeting, up to a maximum of $300.
If we can meet this donor’s challenge, the section only needs to raise $854 to meet our goal to support an Indiana Fellow.
Please consider making a contribution (of any size) to help us reach this goal by the end of the Fall Section meeting on October 7. Thank you for any support you can provide!
Spring 2023 Section Meeting
The Spring 2023 Section Meeting will take place at Indiana University - Kokomo on Friday, March 31, 2023 and Saturday, April 1, 2023. The local organizer is Dr. Amelia Tebbe antebbe (at) iu.edu.
Parking instructions
Parking restrictions are not enforced during the conference (except accessible parking and 24/7 enforceable labeled spots). Parking can be within any student or employee parking space (ST or EM).
Plenary Speakers:
Catherine Hsu
Projective and Non-Abelian SET
Mathematicians love SET. On the surface, this classic game is a con test of pattern recognition, but it also presents an interesting way to visualize the geometry of a torus over a finite field. In this talk, we will discuss some of the mathematics connected to SET and then explore several new versions of the game, including one arising from projective geometry and one arising from non-abelian groups. In particular, we will see how these non-abelian variations on SET can give intuitive visualizations of abstract group structures.
Prime Components in Apollonian packings
An Apollonian circle packing is a fractal arrangement formed by repeatedly inscribing circles into the interstices in a Descartes configuration of four mutually tangent circles. The curvatures of the circles in such a packing are often integers, and so it is natural to ask questions about their arithmetic properties. For example, it is known by work of Bourgain-Fuchs that a positive fraction of integers appear as curvatures in any integral Apollonian circle packing. In this talk, we investigate the arithmetic properties of the collection of integers appearing in “thickened prime components'' of Apollonian circle packings.
Heidi Berger
The Upside of Down Syndrome
My son Isaac has Down syndrome. He was born in 2015, within a year of me receiving tenure at Simpson College. The experience of being his mother has had a profound effect on me as a mathematician. Having been with him through dozens of hospitalizations and surgeries, I wanted to learn about his medical complexities and, more generally, about coordinated health care for those with chronic illness. To accomplish these goals, I've designed and implemented multiple courses and undergraduate research projects over the past several years. This talk will explore how mathematics and a healthy dose of imposter syndrome can be used to understand and improve health care outcomes for individuals with Down syndrome.
INDIANA NEXT PANEL DISCUSSION
Topic: In recent years there has been a surge in interest regarding alternative assessment techniques, such as mastery grading. One barrier to implementing these is sufficient resources and support in getting started. The panelists will discuss their forays into this arena and will share some resources for others to begin testing in their own courses.
Panelists:
Derek Thompson (Taylor University)
Kelsey Walters (Rose-Hulman University)
Moderator:
Rachel Petrik (Rose-Hulman Univeristy)
Fall 2022 Section Meeting
The Fall 2022 Indiana MAA Section Meeting will take place at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana on Saturday, October 22, 2022. A Google Maps link, the schedule, the abstracts for contributed talks and poster presentations, and a poster for the meeting are available below.
PLENARY SPEAKERs
dr. Deirdre Smeltzer, MAA Senior Director of Programs
Spherical Inversions and Applications to Geometry
Standing on the deck of a cruise ship in the ocean and looking off into the horizon, it's easy to understand how our ancestors thought the earth was flat. While an infinite plane and a bounded sphere look completely different to an observer from afar, the spherical earth appears flat when standing upon it. In inversive geometry, the informal notion of visualizing a plane as a sphere with an infinite radius is made precise mathematically, and the distinction between spheres and planes disappears. Furthermore, spherical inversions can be used to provide elegant solutions to geometry problems involving spheres.
Darrin Weber, Data Scientist, Lirio
Bridging the Gap Between Academia and Industry
INDIANA NEXT PANEL DISCUSSION
Topic: Being a Mathematician: Beyond Teaching and Research
Panelists:
Deirdre Smeltzer, MAA Senior Director of Programs
Darrin Weber, Data Scientist for Lirio
Dr. Courtney Taylor, Provost at Anderson University
Moderator:
Justin Lambright, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Anderson University
Description: Dr. Deirdre Smeltzer will lead us in a discussion about various career paths (administrative, etc), as well as other ways to engage in the community both internally and externally.
local information
Because of a conflict with the Covered Bridge Festival, hotels near Terre Haute will be expensive and will be filling up. The organizers were unable to reserve a block, but we recommend the following hotels:
In Terre Haute:
Holiday Inn Express (3.8 miles)
Home2 Suites (3.8 miles)
Hilton Garden Inn (4.6 miles)
On the Terre Haute side of Indianapolis, near the Indianapolis airport
Comfort Suites (68 miles)
Holiday Inn (60 miles)
Hilton Garden Inn (60 miles)
Spring 2022 Section Meeting
The Spring 2022 Indiana MAA Section Meeting will take place in-person at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana on Saturday, April 9, 2022. A schedule for the day, abstracts for contributed talks, and a poster for the meeting are available below.
All attendees are required to wear masks indoors at the conference and will be asked to affirm these safety requirements upon arrival. All attendees are also expected to abide by the MAA Code of Conduct (with special attention paid to Section IV: Expectations for Safe and Inclusive Meetings).
Plenary speakerS
Talithia Williams, HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics
The movie “Hidden Figures” brought visibility to the lives of African American women who served as NASA “human computers” in the 1960s, women who dreamed the impossible in a field where their presence was lacking. When it comes to inspiring the future productivity and innovation of our nation, we are all on the front lines. In this talk, I'll discuss my personal journey as a woman of color in mathematics and share ways we can excite public interest in STEAM, building upon the rich legacy of the Hidden Figures that have come before us. As we shift the fixed mindset around scientific ability, we can begin conversations that improve public perception of STEAM and bring people from all backgrounds into this important work.
Rodrigo Pérez, IUPUI
The Geometric Series in Greek Mathematics
Joint work with Stefano Silvestri, Rome
Is there a center, a navel, to the mathematical universe? An excellent candidate would be the Pythagorean Theorem. In this talk we will make the case for a less conspicuous concept: the Geometric Series.
Every famous computation done by the modern founders of Calculus, when developing their theory, relied on the GS. It was the only way to deal with infinite processes before heavy duty techniques were invented.
Similarly, the Greeks, taking the first primitive steps toward a form of Calculus (the Method of Exhaustion), relied on the first Proposition of Book 10 of Euclid’s Elements; this was their version of the GS.
We will trace the development of Greek Mathematical thought through its most famous episodes: musical theory, Pythagorean means, the discovery of irrationality, cube duplication, the Euclidean algorithm, perfect numbers. . . . Our goal is to show how each of these illustrates a stage of the evolution of ideas leading to Proposition 10.1. We conclude with the only attestation of a true GS computation in any known ancient civilization document.
indiana next Panel discussion
Topic: Mentoring Undergraduates
Panelists:
Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Valparaiso University
Dan Callon, Professor of Mathematics at Franklin College
Lee Trent, Undergraduate at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Moderator:
Justin Lambright, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Anderson University
Description: Dr. Szaniszlo will lead us in a discussion about a systematic approach to mentoring and share from a handbook on this she helped create at Valparaiso. Dr. Callon will share Franklin’s noteworthy approach to career guidance where the emphasis is on professional skills and dispositions, integrated into course structure, activities, and assessments. Lee Trent from Rose-Hulman will share her experience mentoring through the Online Undergraduate Resource Fair for the Advancement and Alliance of Marginalized Mathematicians.
CONTRIBUTED TALKS
The Call for Papers is now closed.
icmc
The Indiana Collegiate Mathematics Competition, often referred to as the ICMC, is a team-based competition for students from area colleges and universities. In this competition, students spend two hours working in teams of up to three members to solve a series of questions on a wide range of mathematical topics. The ICMC began in 1966 and is still going strong! For more information about the ICMC, visit https://www.indiana.maa.org/icmc.
The 2022 ICMC will take place in the morning on Saturday, April 9th as part of the spring section meeting. The deadline for registering teams for the ICMC has now passed.
Contact Student Activities Coordinator Colin McKinney (mckinneyc@wabash.edu) with any questions about the ICMC.
REGistration
Registration is now closed. Regular registration rates apply to everyone EXCEPT students (high school, undergraduate, and graduate), high school teachers, retired and unemployed participants, and non-mathematician guests. Regular registration is $25 until March 23, 2022 and is $30 after March 23, 2022. Students (high school, undergraduate, and graduate), high school teachers, retired and unemployed participants, and non-mathematician guests receive free registration for the conference.
The deadline to order lunch has now passed.
local information
Conference participants are asked to park in Lots 23 or 24 (near the lower right corner on the campus map), near Center Hall (labeled I). Registration is in the Barnes Student Center (in the center, labeled “B” and with the yellow star)
A block of hotel rooms was reserved at Holiday Inn Express (1000 N Baldwin Ave, Marion, IN 46952) for the night of Friday, April 8th at the special rate of $119+tax for a single king room and $129+tax for a double queen room. The deadline to reserve a room as part of this block has now passed.
Fall 2021 Section Meeting (VIRTUAL)
Due to current COVID conditions, the Fall 2021 Section Meeting of the Indiana MAA will take place VIRTUALLY on Saturday, September 25, 2021. Click on the image below to view a pdf version of the poster for the event.
schedule and abstracts
The schedule for this meeting (as of 9/24/21) and abstracts for all of the mathematical sessions are posted below.
REGISTRATION
Registration is now closed. All registered participants were emailed a Zoom link for the meeting on Thursday, September 23rd.
Plenary speakers
James Oxley, Boyd Professor, Louisiana State University
Title: Geometry, Greed, Games, and ‘Roids
Abstract: All who have taken a high school geometry class have seen the construction of a tangent to a circle using a compass and ruler. But, can it be done without using a compass? Now suppose you want to find the cheapest way to connect a set of towns by a rail system. Can you find the answer quickly? Finally, suppose Destroyer and Constructor are playing a game on a connected network, moving alternately. Each of Destroyer’s moves obliterates a link, while each of Constructor’s moves makes a link indestructible. When can Constructor prevent Destroyer from breaking the network into pieces? This talk will answer these three questions and will discuss a common mathematical framework underlying them.
Alain Togbe, Professor of Mathematics, Purdue University Northwest
Title: Current Trends in Diophantine Sets
Abstract: A set of m distinct positive integers {a1,...,am} is called a Diophantine m-tuple if aiaj + 1 is a perfect square. In general, let n be an integer, a set of m positive integers {a1, . . . , am} is called a Diophantine m-tuple with the property D(n) or a D(n)-m-tuple (or a Pn-set of size m), if aiaj + n is a perfect square. Diophantus studied sets of positive rational numbers with the same property, particularly he found the set of four positive rational numbers {1/16, 33/16, 17/4, 105/16}. But the first Diophantine quadruple was found by Fermat. That is the set {1, 3, 8, 120}. Moreover, Baker and Davenport proved that the set {1, 3, 8, 120} cannot be extended to a Diophantine quintuple. The problem of the extendibility of Diophantine m-tuples is of a big interest. During this talk, we will give a very quick history of m-tuples and discuss of the conjectures and the recent progress to solve these conjectures.
Section NEXT Discussion panel
Topic: Alternative Assessments Techniques
Discussion Leaders: Zachary Gates (Wabash College) and Nayeong Kong (IU East)
Description: Zachary Gates will discuss Standards-Based Grading, drawing from his own experiences using this in multiple courses and also sharing what he has learned from others about this method. Nayeong Kong will then share with us Mathematics Outcome Assessments via Canvas, focusing on the assessment methods used recently in an Introduction to Probability Theory course. She will share various ideas to develop the assessment methods both in the classroom and in online courses.
interested in hosting?
The Indiana Section of the MAA is continually seeking sites for its future meetings. The section meets twice each year. The fall meeting is on a Saturday between late September and early November. The spring meeting is on a Friday afternoon and Saturday between early March and early April. Since the Indiana College Mathematics Contest (ICMC) meets in conjunction with the spring meeting, a central location is most desirable. It is our goal to have site commitments two to three years ahead and firm dates set one to two years in advance.
If your department is interested in hosting an Indiana Section meeting, peruse the local arrangements checklist for Fall Meetings or for Spring Meetings to ascertain the extent of your responsibilities and then contact the section Vice-Chair to volunteer.
past section meetings
PHOTOS
Programs and Abstracts
Programs and abstracts from the section meetings of the last decade are posted below. Older programs and abstracts can be viewed in the Section Meeting Archive, one of the libraries of the Indiana Section on MAA Connect.
Spring 2023Indiana University - Kokomo |
Program |
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| Abstracts | |
Fall 2022Rose-Hulman University |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2022Indiana Wesleyan University |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2021Held via Zoom |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2021Held via Zoom |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2020Held via Zoom |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2020Beyond Boundaries: Indiana Academies Symposium (canceled due to COVID-19 pandemic) |
Accepted Abstracts |
Fall 2019Wabash College |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2019University of Indianapolis |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2018Hanover College |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2018Valparaiso University - Tri-Section Meeting of Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2017Manchester University |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2017Earlham College |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2016Purdue University West Lafayette |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2016Franklin College - Centennial Meeting of the Indiana MAA |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2015Purdue University North Central |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2015Taylor University |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2014Trine University |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2014IPFW (now Purdue Fort Wayne) |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2013University of Southern Indiana |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Spring 2013Indiana University East |
Program |
| Abstracts | |
Fall 2012Butler University |
Program |
| Abstracts |
