Mathematics

I will present recent results from my group that pertain to spatio-temporal patterns formed by social foragers. Starting from work on chemotaxis by Lee A. Segel (who was my PhD thesis supervisor), I will discuss why simple taxis of foragers and randomly moving prey cannot lead to spontaneous emergence of patchiness. I will then show how a population of foragers with two types of behaviours can do so. I will discuss conditions under which one or another of these behaviours leads to a winning strategy in the sense of greatest food intake. This problem was motivated by social foraging in eiderducks overwintering in the Belcher Islands, studied by Joel Heath. The project is joint with post-doctoral fellows, Nessy Tania, Ben Vanderlei, and Joel Heath.

This talk was one of the IGTC Student Presentations.

Doodling has many mathematical aspects: patterns, shapes, numbers, and more. Not surprisingly, there is often some sophisticated and fun mathematics buried inside common doodles. I'll begin by doodling, and see where it takes us. It looks like play, but it reflects what mathematics is really about: finding patterns in nature, explaining them, and extending them. By the end, we'll have seen some important notions in geometry, topology, physics, and elsewhere; some fundamental ideas guiding the development of mathematics over the course of the last century; and ongoing work continuing today.

This talk was one of the IGTC Student Presentations.

"Math. The bane of my existence for as many years as I can count. I cannot relate it to my life or become interested in what I'm learning. I find it boring and cannot find any way to apply myself to
it since I rarely understand it." (high school student)
Today, mathematics education faces two major challenges: raising the floor by expanding achievement for all, and lifting the ceiling of achievement to better prepare future leaders in mathematics, as well as in science, engineering, and technology. At first glance, these appear to be mutually exclusive: But are they? Is it possible to design learning that engages the vast majority of students in higher mathematics learning? In this presentation, I will present the findings and discuss the implications from a research study that explored the ways to teach mathematics that both raised the floor and lifted the ceiling.