The University Association for Women in Mathematics is hosting Sonia Math Day, a program designed for girls in the eighth to 12th grade, on Nov. 10.  

The theme for the fall Sonia Math Day is Walks Through Mathematics, and it is sponsored by the University Department of Mathematics.

Emily Shinkle, president of AWM and graduate student in LAS, said everyone who participates in the event are volunteers.

“It is great to bring girls on campus and allow them to interact with math topics that are different from what they see at schools,” Shinkle said. “A lot of mathematicians would agree that the math that is taught in high school and middle school is different from the one that mathematicians research.”

Sonia Math Day is one of the numerous events AWM organizes. The purpose of the organization is to encourage women and girls to study, have active careers in the mathematical sciences and to promote equal opportunity and equal treatment of women and girls in the field.

The event is held twice a year and is named after Sonia Kovalevsky, female Russian mathematician who was a pioneer and the first female to receive a doctoral degree in the field.

While Sonia Math Day is a national event hosted on university campuses across the country, many schools no longer host the event.

Zoi Rapti, associate professor and faculty adviser of the AWM University chapter, cited the lack of funding as one of the main reasons other universities on the national level have stopped hosting the event.

Dana Neidinger, outreach committee chair of the graduate student chapter of the AWM, however, said there are challenges relating to the outreach efforts in the community.

“We have 12 girls participating this year, and generally, we get around 10 to 15 girls,” she said. “Advertising is difficult; that’s why, maybe in the future, we will try to bring the activities to people rather than them coming to us.”

Even though there is not a follow up to the participants’ mathematics performance after the program, Neidinger said they asked the girls what they thought about the event, and the fact that they keep coming back is a sign they enjoy it.

The hands-on activities offered on Sonia Math Day can help expose young girls to all the applications mathematics has outside of classrooms.

“One of our goals in the future is that when we run a Sonia Math Day, we want to document and save the activities so that when other chapters of AWM of other institutions want to run the similar program, we can share with them and create a database of activities for it,” Neidinger said.

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