Mathematics & Statistics Department

Convocation - Faculty heading off to convoke!

Math-Stats-CS Hike - Students and faculty in Math-Stats and CS enjoyed getting out in nature for the annual hike at Tryon Creek State Park.

  

What's a Reedie? - Recent grads in Math (Stats) and CS/Math were recently selected to highlight what it means to be a Reedie! Congrats to Asa and Riley!!

Each week this summer, summer researchers in Math, Stats, CS, Physics, and allied fields had an opportunity to participate in a weekly lunch seminar. Students presented for 5-ish minutes on their active research projects.

Congratulations to the '24 Math-Stats Renn Fayre softball team (Truncated Cumulative Hierarchy of the Universe). The team made it to the quarter finals only to be beaten by the eventual tournament winner. Awesome job everyone!

Math/Stats/CS Reedies and faculty gathered recently for the annual interdisciplinary hike! Such a great tradition!!

Another beautiful day for a hike with Math/Stats/CS Reedies and faculty! Such a great tradition!!

As part of their coursework with Prof. Hank Ibser [math], Reed students Wolfgang Brightenburg ’23, Robin Hart ’23, Bhav Khurana ’23, and Tina Qin ’23 found major methodological flaws in College Scorecard, a common online tool breaking down students’ annual income according to where they attended college. Read the article..

A team of three Reedies, Robin Hart '23, Maxwell VanLandSchoot '22, and Sung Bum “Simon” Ahn ’23 recently won 1st place in the intermediate section of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) sponsored Undergraduate Statistics Project Competition (USPROC). Read the article..

This annual event took place October 2nd at Tryon Creek State Park and was well attended by students and faculty from the math and computer science departments.

Harpeth Lee, a current Reed Math-Stat senior, is featured in the Reed College magazine article “Through the Looking Glass”.  The college recently received a grant from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation to obtain a light sheet microscope, which creates highly accurate 3-D images of cells.  This powerful new tool generates a lot of data and this past summer Harpeth, in his role as the inaugural data intern, explored how to harness and store that data.  Harpeth's efforts will help biology, statistics, computer science, and physics students to be able to start exploring and working with this rich new data!

The Reed Stats and CS departments recently hosted a data visualization contest where students formed groups to create their own graphics using US colleges data. Four winners were selected: Gillian McGinnis winning “Most Visually Appealing”, the Mlabbies (Simon Couch, Leila Shokat, Josh Yamamoto, and Ingrid Zoll) winning “Most Informative”, Amrita Sawhney and Simon Ahn with “Best Presentation”, and finally, the Dashing Devils (Alex Flowers, Isabelle Caldwell, Olek Wojcik, Lauren Rabe) taking home “Best Overall”. See everyone’s beautiful visualizations.

Simon Couch, a Reed Math-Stat senior, is the 2021 winner of the John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award, which is “given for the development and implementation of computational tools for the statistical profession by a graduate or undergraduate student”.  The competition is co-sponsored by the Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics Sections of the American Statistical Association. Simon won the award for his R software package, stacks, which allows a user to build ensemble models using tidy data principles.  Simon started stacks while interning at RStudio PBC and has finished the package as part of his Reed senior thesis.  Although stacks has only been on the Comprehensive R Archive Network, a common central repository for R packages, for less than 3 months, it has already been downloaded over 1200 times! To learn more about the power of stacks, check out Simon’s blog.

Two Reed teams placed in the Spring 2020 Undergraduate Statistics Research Project Competition.  Olek Wojcik, Paul Nguyen, and Samuel Olson (otherwise known as the Tree Amigos) were awarded second place for their project entitled "A Comparison of Forest Estimations: Post-Stratification and Generalized Regression Estimators".  Naomi Boss and Timothy Shinners received third place for their project entitled "Vote by Mail: A study on the effects of voting by mail on election turnout in Utah".  To learn more about their projects, visit the competition website.

Simon Couch ’21 earns national recognition for promise in science and math. Read the full article.

Reed undergraduate Zeki Kazan discusses research to privatize statistical analyses. Watch video.

Teams tied for 2nd place at the Undergraduate Statistics Research Project Competition. Read full article.

Study reveals the steep penalty that the rankings giant imposes on Reed. Read full article.

Reedies win 1st place in national competition for innovative new privacy algorithm. Read full article.

Prof. Irena Swanson is named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Read full article.

American Statistical Association honors two Reed math seniors for theses on networks and bicycle routes.  Read full article.

Angélica Osorno and Kyle Ormsby won a grant from the NSF to do research in homotopy theory, a branch of mathematics that uses the tools of algebra to explore the otherworldly terrain of topology. Read full article.