Ruhlman Conference

Every spring, Wellesley has an annual campus-wide conference to celebrate Wellesley students' achievements. Wellesley's Mathematics students have given talks and presented posters on independent studies and on independent research.

In some years, mathematics classes have put together Ruhlman exhibits: hands-on demonstrations to illustrate the beauty and the challenges of a wide range of mathematical topics, from Graph Theory to Knot Theory to the fourth dimension. In fact, these exhibits have proved to be popular Ruhlman attractions, not just an outlet for math students' creativity.

Here are some more detailed descriptions of past math projects presented at the 2003 Ruhlman Conference:

Math 225 students will show you some exciting math puzzles and models. Can you design one-way streets for a town so that traffic flows smoothly? Can you help a dating service arrange blind dates on consecutive nights and in different restaurants so that everyone dates everyone else and samples each type of food? Come to our exhibit and play with the models and learn how to solve these and other fun problems.

Topology deals with objects that can be stretched, twisted, shrunk, and bent and still be considered the same object. Knot theory is a branch of topology that deals with knots: Take a piece of string, tie it around itself, then glue the loose ends together. How do you describe your knot? If we also make a knot, is it the same as yours? In knot theory many of the problems are easy to conceptualize, although not always so easy to solve. The interactive exhibits will help answer the questions above and provide visitors with a sense of what it is like to study advanced mathematics.

The fourth dimension is an elusive concept for most people. Physicists tell us that we live in a four-dimensional universe -- three spatial dimensions plus time. Mathematicians, however, need not be constrained by the physical world: we can study the geometry of a hypothetical universe with four spatial dimensions. The human brain, wired for a 3-D existence, cannot fully visualize objects in such a universe, but we can still obtain a glimpse of it by making 3-D models of 4-D objects (just as we can draw 2-D pictures of 3-D objects). They are huge, intricate and beautiful -- as much art as they are math! Come bend your mind and stretch your imagination, or just enjoy our multicolored artwork.