Report on LASER – Math & Art Day
The third installment of Math & Art Day was held on campus on Saturday, April 12th
Posted in: Students and Alumni
The event was attended by 26 high school students (freshman, sophomores and juniors) from various parts of NJ (Paterson, Parsippany, Clifton, Montville, Kearney, Kinnelon, Hackettstown, Montclair, North Bergen) . The program was conducted by two faculty members (Bogdan Nita and Ashwin Vaidya) and assisted by several math ambassadors (Annabella Ganun, Ryan Avalon, Preston Pietruzewski, RJ Chandler, Jacquelyn Franqui and Vlad Nita).
The visiting students were put in teams of four or five and our student assistants served as team leaders, helping and guiding them through various exercises. We also had our faculty Dr. Eliza Leszynski and adjunct faculty Sarah Acquiviva, participate in the session. Sarah will be teaching our new SEEDS course MATH 105-Math & Movies and was in attendance to get more ideas for the course.
Click on an image below to enlarge photo.
The theme of the event was Math in the Movies and over the course of the day, we use different kinds of math to analyze scenes and clips from different movies for their correctness or exaggerations.
The session started at 10am with breakfast and introductions, after which Dr. Nita led them through a session on the various correct and incorrect uses of the Pythagorean theorem in movies. The students were also guided through a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using paper cutouts of right triangles.
The session lasted about 90 minutes and ended with a discussion of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Students broke for lunch from around noon to 12.45pm, after which Dr. Vaidya held a session on a similar theme, discussing movies such as Interstellar, Inception and Good Will Hunting for their mathematical content. Through the session, students were asked to collaborate, discuss, compute and share their thinking with each other and the entire class. Students received certificates of participation and the event ended by 3pm.
