Allgirlsallmath2014

Today, as part of the AGAM camp, the girls had a mini course on aerodynamics. And then we flew in tiny airplanes.

I wish I could say that this post was going to contain some math, but really, I’m just going to post pictures.

I got to steer the plane, to everyone’s dismay.

But despite my lack off subtlety and grace, no high schoolers were harmed this evening.

This week, I’m teaching one of the parallel “Codes and Cryptography” classes at the All Girls/All Math camp at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It’s so much fun to be in a room full of budding mathematicians from all over the country, and it reminds me of what it felt like to love the idea of math before getting too deep into any particular specialization.

I’ve made a few resources for the class, which I’ll drop in this post as the week continues.

Obviously, the rock climbing links come first…:

Bouldering vs. Top-Roping (vs. Lead-Climbing)

Rock climbing and teaching math

And here are some relevant math links:

The Bletchley Circle on PBS:

http://www.pbs.org/program/bletchley-circle/

A quick review of the symmetric cryptography systems we talked about on Day 1:

http://animoto.com/play/x7rvb7VPhZZWbFKdzH3J0g

Here’s an article about a new kind of space race — the race to bounce perfectly secret codes off low-orbit satellites using quantum cryptography:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528671/the-space-based-quantum-cryptography-race/

For encrypting and decrypting messages, you can play with the web apps at http://www.cryptoclub.org.

And after the jump, there’s an except lifted from a blog post by Cathy O’Neil at mathbabe.org: