Splash Biography

Stories from a physics college student: For the entire session, you will have the opportunity to ask questions regarding college, from personal finance to college experiences, choosing classes, and dealing with life and its difficulties. With college acceptances around the same time, I will try my best to give you a casual setting to discuss any aspect of high school to college readiness and even academics to see if you'd see yourself as a Golden Bear but will hopefully leave with enthusiasm and confidence to take on wherever your next steps take you! Come join us and meet other students alike and a physics undergraduate with Jurassic Park shoes!

Coffee is everywhere, but there is much more to the world of coffee than caffeine. A cup of coffee can be chocolately, fruity, nutty, or tea-like, and there is is a massive number of factors that influence what your coffee is like. This class will be a hands on intro to the vast world of coffee. We'll touch on the major tastes, how tasting works, different methods of coffee processing, methods of brewing, and the impact of your water on brewing. We'll be brewing and tasting coffee together, so come prepared for a bit of caffeine (tasting is optional, but encouraged!).

What exactly is infinity? Is there something bigger than infinity? What is infinity plus one? In this class, we'll use mathematical games to explore the concept of infinity and define many different (inifinitely many, in fact!) infinite numbers.

SET is a popular card game of pattern recognition. Whether you're an expert at the game or have never played, come play SET and learn about some of the math behind it and some (math-inspired) variants! We'll touch fields of math such as group theory and combinatorics along the way.

What is a qubit, and what makes it more exciting than a classical bit? What are topics that have been in the news such as quantum supremacy and quantum error correction really about? In this class, I'll give an overview of what quantum computing is, what it isn't, and what progress is being made in quantum computing research.

Learn how to play Hackenbush, a simple game that leads to interesting mathematics. After getting some practice playing, we'll see how the game inspires the surreal numbers, a system of numbers that allows us to to play with infinity in an unusual way.

Learn how to play Hackenbush, a simple game that leads to interesting mathematics. After getting some practice playing, we'll see how the game inspires the surreal numbers, a system of numbers that allows us to to play with infinity in an unusual way.

There are $$n$$ internships and $$n$$ possible interns. Each intern has a ranking of their preferred internships, and each internship has a ranking of their preferred interns, and our goal is to pair each intern with an internship. Can all of the interns and internships be satisfied? It might be easy to see that not everyone can get their top choice in general, but what's the best we can do? In this class, we'll discuss what it means for such a matching to be stable and discover an optimal algorithm for this problem, which is actually used to match medical students to residency programs!

In 2019, Google made the news with a claim of achieving "quantum supremacy". What does this mean, and why do people care about quantum computing in the first place? In this class, I will give a high-level overview of what makes quantum computing special, what quantum supremacy is, and what Google did. Along the way, we'll talk about some big ideas in quantum computing and theoretical computer science.