Over 200 students throughout Mississippi attended Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day at Mississippi State University on Friday. Students represented nine high schools and home school programs in Mississippi that strive to excel in mathematics.
Friday’s activities marked the first time for MSU to host the event, which began four years ago on the campus of Mississippi University for Women. Kovalevsky is recognized as one of the world’s best mathematicians and the first European woman to attain a significant result in general theory of partial differential equations.
In honor of Kovalevsky, workshops were designed to teach high school students higher math skills in a creative style. Students could choose from various types of math, including RSA encryption, calculus of a production function, number patterns and Chi square to name a few. Students were also challenged with trivia questions on the life of Kovalevsky.
Participant Tiffany Bray, a home-schooled student, said the problems focused on unusual topics.
“They taught us how to use graphing calculators to find the probability of the number of M&M’s in a pack. It was really easy for everyone to understand,” Bray said.
At the end of Friday’s events, three winners emerged from the Mississippi School of Math and Science in Columbus and received a medal from MSU President Charles Lee. First place was awarded to Wendy Boggess, second place to Tom Feng, and Bjorn Carlsson took home third-place honors.
Feng said he found most of the problems pretty easy to find.
“Some of the questions were kind of tricky, but overall it was easy,” he said. “We got to use the Internet for information. I only missed two out of 20 questions.”
The Association for Women in Mathematics donated $2,000 for the program, and the MSU department of mathematics and statistics, the college of arts and sciences, the office of enrollment services, the office of academic affairs and the office of research funded the remaining costs. The 2004 Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day will return to the MUW campus.