Instructors: Dr. Kristen Hendricks and Ms. Nessa Madison

Intended For: Students entering grades 6-8

Dates: June 29 – July 3, 2020

Time: 9 am – 12 pm

Location: Rutgers University, College Avenue Campus, Academic Building 2250

Costs: Thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation, this camp will be offered free of charge to interested students.  Due to limited space, a short application is required; selection will be based on demonstrated interest in mathematics.

Applications and Forms:

Contact: Please email Kristen Hendricks (kristen.hendricks@rutgers.edu) with any questions.

We know the surface of the planet is a sphere, or close to it. But while you're walking around in your day-to-day life, you almost always treat it as a flat plane, like the top of a table. You can't actually tell that you aren't standing on a flat surface unless you can see a long distance, or something else unusual is going on -- for example, you might have left the earth on a rocketship, and be able to see its shape from outer space.

You can imagine a world where everyone lived on the surface of a huge donut, big enough that if you were standing on it somewhere it would just look like a flat plane to you. (This doesn't actually happen because of how gravity works, but in math we often ignore things like that so we can think about a question we're interested in.) You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that world and this one just from where you were standing. But we can think about what the differences between those two planets would be. This is really the question of what kinds of two-dimensional shapes there are, and what makes them different. We’ll work on understanding this question in a hands-on way, such as by playing familiar games on different shapes and seeing what changes.

Similarly to how you're always walking around on the surface of the planet, you're always moving through three-dimensional universe. Like with the surface of the planet, you can't tell what the overall shape of the universe is just by looking -- and while you can leave the surface of the planet to look at it, you can't leave the universe to look at it, so this is a hard problem. In this camp we'll also talk about various three-dimensional shapes -- possible mathematical universes, if you like -- and what they would be like.

Students attending should enjoy doing mathematics and particularly geometry, be comfortable with the usual K-5 curriculum, and be willing to think about problems rooted more in shapes than in numbers.

About the Instructors

Kristen Hendricks is a researcher in topology, the mathematical study of shape. She got her Ph.D. from Columbia in 2013 and joined the Rutgers faculty in Fall 2019 after stints at UCLA and Michigan State. She has previously run this camp twice at Michigan State and looks forward to running it at Rutgers.

Nessa Madison has 10 years of experience as a middle school math teacher in the Roselle Public School District. She has a M.A. in Education, as well as a M.A. in School Administration. She is looking forward to a fun and exciting summer program!