On April 14, the Amherst College Department of History hosted the 2020-21 Hawkins Lecture, “Why Diversity Makes Science Not Just Fairer, but Better,” with Dr. Naomi Oreskes. The Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and author of Why Trust Science? walked us through a fast-paced and compelling presentation on…
The belief that math is difficult or even boring is commonplace, but Audrey Rosevear, the Math Club president, doesn’t think it has to be. Math Club was created as a haven where students can explore what math looks like in research and beyond in a stakes-free environment, as well as a forum to discuss mathematical…
(adapted from a Zoom interview between Samantha Rydzewski and Sarah Lapean) Samantha Rydzewski, a computer science and math double major, took some time out of her busy schedule on March 22 to tell us about her thesis with the computer science department. She is looking at suboptimal attacks against machine learning models, and investigating how…
More than 20 curious students, faculty, and members of the Pioneer Valley community hopped onto Zoom on March 24th, 2021 to find the answer to the question, “How do the humanities and artificial intelligence connect?” The talk was facilitated by Visiting Professor Lee Spector, who founded Amherst College’s Arts in the Liberal Arts initiative this…
Being in the class of 2021E, I started my mathematics thesis in Spring 2020, and actually concluded it in Fall 2020, officially handing it in on the 11th of November. It was under the supervision of two advisors: Professor Ivan Contreras, a close mentor whose work with a prior summer I hoped to continue in…
This article was written by Guest Reporters April Dottin-Carter’23 (WiCS President), Karen Liu’23 (WiCS Secretary and Website Content Writer), and Hope Tsai’23 (WiCS Website Content Writer). To learn more about WiCS, check out their website shown above! April Dottin-Carter ’23 believes that when people with strong, positive morals and diverse backgrounds come together to innovate…
On March 9th, Professor Palmquist led the latest conversation of the Psychology Department Spring 2021 Lecture Series. She spoke with Anna Vuong ’18 and Sydney “Kramer” Peterson ’17 about how they went from psychology majors at Amherst to their current jobs as teachers. Anna was a psychology major who was involved in Ed Pros, QuestBridge,…
Amherst College Biophysicist-Approved Collection of Coronavirus Information The following database comes from Donna Roscoe’21 as part of the BCBP400 course COVID Communications Project. One of the worst parts of this pandemic is the lack of concrete knowledge regarding the virus. Even the littlest fact can tether us to reality, keeping our minds from going to…
You are working on a 15-page essay at 2 in the morning, and just as you start your concluding paragraph, a burst of pain shoots to your head. The pain lingers for another 4 hours before you call it quits and decide to write the rest of your essay after a good night’s (or morning’s?)…
In the early weeks of Fall 2016, Prof. Janice Hudgings of Pomona College tasked the sophomores in her Modern Physics course with identifying the scientists whose work was presented in the course textbook. The results: of the credited scientists, 99% were male, and 98% were white. These statistics are only the beginning. Since the late…