The Largest Math Gathering in the World
Each year the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire Mathematics department takes students who do collaborative research with faculty to the Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) to present on their research. The JMM is the largest annual math conference in the world and draws several thousand Mathematicians every year. This year, the conference took place this year from January 3-6, 2024 in San Francisco, CA. While the majority of Mathematicians who attend and present are professional researchers and educators, there is a sizable community of undergraduates who also present their research as well.
Presenting My Research
For an undergraduate student presenting on a research project for the first time, it is typical to do a poster session. But I, the ambitious scholar that I am, decided instead to give a 10 minute talk in the Pi Mu Epsilon undergraduate sessions. While I possess strong academic writing skills, I have had much fewer opportunities to develop my public speaking skills. So although unconventional, I wanted to give a talk for the sake of my development as a mathematician.
While writing the talk was difficult due to the time constraints, it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed crafting a story which chronicled what we observed, what questions we asked, and how we arrived at our results. The highlight of giving the talk was answering questions from the audience of undergraduates from institutions all across the country. I hadn't yet had the occasion to listen to thoughts and ideas which my peers had on my research, and I really appreciated their thoughtful questions and insights. Looking ahead to graduate school, I am exciting to attend conferences and engage in similar discourse with other PhD level Mathematicians and graduate students alike. In my experience, community has truly been a pillar of learning.
This year I will be giving at least two more presentations on my research. Over the summer I will be attending a Research Experience for Undergraduates at Iowa State, and will be expected to present to my peers periodically. From the process of preparing for my talk at JMM, I learned a lot about writing and presenting which I will carry forward with me. I learned about the process of researching in a big picture sense from parsing through a myriad of results to find the pieces that were connected. Some of these pieces which were seemingly connected still required explicit linking together. What surprised me was how helpful this exercise was in recentering my focus within the research and identifying what questions remained unexplored. I learned many technical skills about formatting presentations using LaTex, the document processing language chosen by the majority of mathematicians. Furthermore, I learned how to tailor a presentation to the audience. This meant making decisions about what background to include and the degree to which I needed to explain certain concepts and results. I have sat through an unfortunate number of presentations which were dry and difficult to grasp in a short amount of time. To make my presentation digestible and interesting for the audience, my mentor and I found a way to present results in a way which was visually engaging. Rather than talking about the fundamental period of second-order linear recurrence sequences modulo m as an abstract concept, I arranged them into a circle which allowed me to visually demonstrate what many of my results actually meant. This technique for visualizing data inspired further research which turned out to be very productive and exciting.
Experiencing New Mathematics
At JMM, I had the exciting opportunity to learn about mathematics that I had never heard of or seen before. Although most of the regular sessions were not given with an undergraduate audience in mind, I could make connections between concepts mentioned and concepts which I had learned in my highest level math courses. One of the most exciting things about learning math is when ideas which are very abstract and seemingly disconnected start to come together into a larger picture. While most of the topics of the talks I went to may remain outside of my grasp until I am well into graduate school, it was inspiring and motivating to see what scholars are researching, and to imagine where my particular skills and interests might fit.
Left to right: Caden Joergens, Briar Weston, and me at JMM 2024. Together we comprised Dr. Silviana Amethyst's student research team.
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