Every Tuesday at 3 p.m. math students swarm the RAC lobby to join in the time-honored tradition known as the Tuesday Tea at Three. The Tea has thrived as a way for students of math to develop their passion outside of the classroom.
“The goal of Math Tea is two-fold: first to build community among Math majors and faculty and second to expose students to interesting mathematics said Mathematics Professor Kendra Killpatrick, who has been teaching at Pepperdine since the original inception of the Tea, nine years ago.
Open to all math students and friends of the Math Department, the tea begins with a time of sharing food and fellowship in the lobby. Students also use this time to collaborate on assignments and gain face time with professors. At 3:20, the group moves to a classroom, where a student or faculty member gives a 20-minute talk that either expands on coursework or presents a new area of math research. Topics vary widely, and past talks have ranged from discussions of math education research to probability in sports and unanswered questions in mathematics.
On Wednesday, sophomore Wancen Jiang gave a talk on the fourth dimension using 3-D models of a tesseract, or a fourth-dimensional cube, an object that cannot exist in any tangible form in the familiar 3-D world.
I gave this speech last year at the PCUMC [Pacific Coast Undergraduate Mathematics Conference]. People like this topic because you couldn’t see it — you have to talk about it Jiang said.
The Math Department hosts several themed Teas throughout the year, including pumpkin pi” painting at Halloween and Easter ellipsoid coloring.
Tuesday Tea is part of an extensive program of extra-curricular math activities hosted by the department including Math Formal and the Women in Math Christmas Breakfast.
“You have to make students want to be a part of the discussion Killpatrick said. By having events that a fun you make students realize that it can be fun to be an intellectual.”