Applied Math in Action

Applied Math in Action, ESAM's outreach activity, went south on September 12, 2016, to Lindblom Math & Science Academy, a selective enrollment high school of the Chicago Public School system on the south side of Chicago. Graduate students Brit Schneiders and Josh Levy introduced the high school students to basic machine learning with The Math behind Netflix, Kaitlin Hill and Namrata Patel illustrated `crowd estimation' in The Wisdom of the Crowd, and Eric Autry demonstrated the use of stochastic algorithms in optimization problems ('Cheap M&M Storage'). Guided by graduate student Sara Clifton, this Applied Math in Action emphasized participatory learning which, for instance, transformed the Metropolis algorithm into a game of dice.

The outreach event was organized in cooperation with Sara Goldstein, who is the Lindblom liason with the Schuler Scholar Program, mentored by faculty members Alvin Bayliss and Hermann Riecke, and supported by the NSF-funded RTG Quantitative Biology.