The Department of Mathematics, housed in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, partnered with the West Virginia Council of Teachers of Mathematics recently to sponsor the 2005 Fall Student Mathematics Symposium at WVU .

The symposium, founded by Professor James Dowdy in 1990, gives high-achieving students a chance to learn about novel areas of mathematics. The event focuses on interactive presentations by college faculty. Twenty-eight students from 10 middle and high schools attended this years event. A list of schools and students attending the symposium follows the release.

Three faculty members in the Department of Mathematics gave formal presentations, encouraging active participation from the students and suggested additional problems and projects for further study and research.

Professor Mike Maystalk,Picks Theorem and Modular Inverses,focused on ways to calculate areas of special polygons by counting lattice points. The theorem is a novel way to find modular inverses by calculating an area in two ways.

Professor John Goldwasser led the second session,Mysteries of Pascals Triangle.He and the students worked together to discover and prove many properties of Pascal’s triangle, the pattern of coefficients that arises in binomial expansions, including recurrence relations, row sums, alternating row sums, and the balance between even and odd entries.

Professor Ian Christie conductedMathematical Games of Martin Gardner,presenting students with handouts that demonstrated many of the ideas from the popularScientific Americancolumn, including flexagons, chess problems, word play and paradoxes of infinity.

For more information about the Student Math Symposium, please contact Professor Mays at 304-293-2011, ext. 2324, or at mays@math.wvu.edu .

Schools and students attending the 2005 Math Symposium were:

Bridgeport High School, Bridgeport: Josh Brown, Andrew Ford, Daych Fung Eric Lopez, Sam Romano and Katie Sickman

Brooke High School , Wellsburg: John Allen Zumpetta

Buckhannon-Upshur High School , Buckhannon: Cory Duke, Nick Dunbar Paul Kennedy and Cara Parcell

Frankfort High School, Ridgeley: Dallas Humphries and Laura Tappe

Morgantown High School, Morgantown: Piotr Wojciechowski

North Marion High School, Farmington: Thomas Carpenter and Ryan Glance

Riverside High School , Belle: Velma Cannafax, Matthew Connelly, Michael Connelly and Megan Cox

Suncrest Middle School, Morgantown: Tonia Ahmed, Jonathan Hensel and Colin Kemp

Wheeling Park High School, Wheeling: Curtis Evick, Tawfiq Khoury andTravis Scammell

Wirt County High School, Elizabeth: Tabby Knicely and Amber Murphy