Announcements

Congratulations!

To the 2009 MAA-NCS Distinguished Teaching Award winner Danrung Huang (St. Cloud State University) and the 2009 MAA-NCS Meritorious Service Award winner Thomas Sibley (St. John's University).

Information about the 2009 MAA-NCS
Summer Seminar
is available! 

The seminar is entitled: 

ACTUALLY DOING IT!

A Hands-On Approach to Computational Combinatorial Geometry

with the principal lecturer Professor Jesús De Loera, University of California, Davis and will be held at St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN, July 19-24, 2009. 

Information Sheet

Registration Form

Tentative Schedule

The Spring 2009 MAA-NCS Meeting was held April 24-25, 2009 at

Hamline University

in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

The presentation of the

North Central Section Workshop

on
Program Review

is available here.

You can find the minutes of the Business and Executive Meetings here.

The program for the spring meeting

is still available here.

The Spring 2009 MAA-NCS Newsletter is now available.

Congratulations to St. Olaf's Team "Euler"!  Winners of the Fall 2008 NCS Team Competition which was held for Saturday, November 15, 2008. For the listing of the top third teams and a copy of problems and solutions from the competition, visit the NCS Team Competition page.

The Fall 2008 MAA-NCS Section Meeting was held October 17-18, 2008 at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.  Executive Committee minutes and Business Meeting minutes are now available. The fall meeting program and fall newsletter are still available.

Spring 2009

Invited Speakers

The Lost Notebook of Ramanujan

George Andrews (bio)

The Pennsylvania State University

In 1976 quite by accident, I stumbled across a collection of about 100 sheets of mathematics in Ramanujan's handwriting; they were stored in a box in the Trinity College Library in Cambridge.  I titled this collection "Ramanujan's Lost Notebook" to distinguish it from the famous notebooks that he had prepared earlier in his life.  On and off for the past 32 years, I have studied these wild and confusing pages.  Some of the weirder results have yielded entirely new lines of research in number theory are related topics.  I will try to provide a gentle account of where these efforts have led.  I will conclude the talk with an account of Ramanujan at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Gotta Have My Dots:

Strategies for Dot Voting

Jason Douma (bio)

University of Sioux Falls

Dot voting is a popular form of approval voting, in which each voter is awarded a fixed number of “dots” that may be allocated strategically by the voter among the various selections being considered.  Our own section employed dot voting last spring as a way of identifying priorities which would be recommended to MAA leadership at the national level.  In a dot voting environment, a voter might choose to concentrate her dots in one or two favorite selections, as a way to help ensure that her top choice is elected; alternatively, a voter may choose to spread out her dots among many desirable selections, hoping to push multiple choices across the threshold of victory. This talk will employ game-theoretic concepts to examine risk-averse and risk-loving behavior in the dynamics of dot voting.