Meeting #4 Minutes (9/18)

Attendence for Math Club Meeting #4

So, we broke more ice.  I am starting to see a trend happening.  The question this week was, "Tell us something interesting about yourself."  I have to say...math people are either really interesting or really quiet.  No worries.  My challenge this year is to bring everyone out of their respective shells by the end of the semester.  If you are reading this, yes, I mean you.  Get ready for next week's breaking bad ice question.

Then, I went over the minutes from last week.  I know, I know.  Many of you are tired of hearing my voice dominate the meeting.  Personally, I never get tired of hearing my voice, so of course I spent as much time on this section as possible.  Similarly, I am taking an entire paragraph in this blog to talk about how I read the minutes from this blog.  Yes, I realize that I just went 2pi.

We watched a video on how Archimedes (one of the most famous mathematicians of all time) could find the area of a circle by just using triangles.  Why is it that all math seemingly always comes back to triangles.  What is wrong with having everything be rectangles?  I think the math gods are trying to give me a sin that I am never going to get away from triangles.

Becca's contribution to the blog (notice that it is all business):
"JMM 2015 might be too expensive, so we brainstormed some ideas for field trips. Diedrik suggested that we tour NASA in Mountain View. Professor Hoffman has suggested Stanford Lectures.
Professor Lapuz and one other person brought up visiting Stanford SLAC, which is the particle accelerator used to read Archimedes' recently discovered text."

We watched a second video until the end of the hour.  The video was a Ted Talk on the Archimedes text that was recovered from a prayer book.  Apparently, this prayer book contained 2 other super important texts in it.  Whichever monk reused these different books and parchment had some high quality taste.  If I were a medieval monk, I guess I would want to use the paper of the most famous books in history, too.  Don't feel bad if you left the meeting early...I sure don't.

Next week's meeting (#5) will be held in 3-148, where we will suspend regular Math Club meeting activity in order to visit a guest lecture about Prof. Lapuz's philosophy in math.