PROVIDENCE, RI—Eight Atlanta-area high school students will have the chance to convert their math knowledge into hard cash when they compete in Who Wants to be a Mathematician, Tuesday, November 16 at 10:45 a.m. in the Joe Mack Wilson Student Center theater on the Southern Polytechnic State University campus in Marietta. Top prize in the game is $2000.

Students were selected based on their scores on a qualifying test, which featured questions like

• Circle the number in the following list that is divisible by 9: 9481, 1043, 2737, 8703, 7381; and
• Put these mathematicians in order of their birth, starting with the earliest born: Riemann, Newton, Hilbert, Gauss.

Who Wants to be a Mathematician is free and open to the public. It will run approximately one hour, from 10:45 a.m. to 11:55 a.m., and follows a talk:

Markov Chains and Osmosis
Or
Homer Dreams of Getting Smarter
by
Steve Edwards
Mathematics Department
Southern Polytechnic State University

 

Homer had great plans to ace his college classes the easy way, with no work at all! In this presentation, we look at the some mathematics behind the migration of the ideas in Homer's book into Homer's brain cells, and vice versa.

Information about past performances of Who Wants to be a Mathematician is at www.ams.org/ams/wwtbam.html.

 SPSU Mathematics Department