Fields Undergraduate Summer
The 2017 Fields Undergraduate Summer Research Program
was our biggest ever, with 33 students from around the
world working on 10 projects and exploring a wide range of
mathematics.
Brian Morris is a declared math major who just finished
his first year at Stanford, but you might find him reading
more than math books – he plans to declare a second
major in comparative literature next year. At Fields, Brian
worked on Project 5: determining the local dimensions of
self-similar measures with overlap, supervised by Kevin
Hare and Kathryn Hare (no relation) from the University
of Waterloo. Due to unforeseen issues, his project
partner was unable to make it, but that doesn’t mean
Brian spent the summer alone. In fact, his favourite part
of the program was meeting all the other undergrads
who were “both as interested in math as [he was] and
also normal, chill people that like to do fun things.”
B ri an
“Mat h is in
every place
– in biolog y,
in mecha nics,
in physi cs, in
whate ver you
want – math is
there .”
Magdalen
Up until grade 10, Magdalen Dobson thought she would study
philosophy, but then, she discovered grade 11 calculus. “I started reading
through my textbook and reading the proofs of all the theorems and I
realized that the logic and reasoning that I struggled with in philosophy
is much more prevalent in theoretical math. I think that’s what made
me decide to study it”. She is now pursuing her undergraduate degree
in pure math at MIT. At Fields, Dobson and her group were trying to
find a less computationally intensive alternative to Marked Branching
Diffusion for calculating value adjustments on derivatives. The work was
supervised by a team from Scotiabank.
Got to see some Rogers C up
tenni s from the V IP box court esy
of the Dean of Scien ce and
Presi dent's Offic e at York
University !
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