Weinstein Receives Schafer Prize Honorable Mention

Already a published mathematician and seasoned presenter, Harvey Mudd College mathematics major Madeleine Weinstein ’16 is getting noticed: She was selected as an Honorable Mention recipient of the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics.

Given by the Association for Women in Mathematics, the prize is for the most outstanding female mathematics undergraduate in the United States, and receiving honorable mention is a notable honor.

Weinstein has been recognized by Harvey Mudd faculty with two departmental honors, the Giovanni Borrelli Mathematics Prize and the Robert James Prize. A faculty nominator says she is “extraordinarily talented, has a great work ethic, is creative and has remarkable mathematical maturity.”

Weinstein participated in three highly competitive Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs: the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, the SMALL REU at Williams College and University of Minnesota, Duluth. As a sophomore in the SMALL REU, she worked on three projects: Ramsey Theory, Zeckendorf Decompositions and Benford’s law. Her work resulted in two papers accepted, one paper in revision and three more under review. At Duluth, she proved stronger invariance properties of the Sprague-Grundy function that encompass three conjectures of Fraenkel and Ho; this work resulted in a single author paper submitted to Integers. She has given numerous presentations at national conferences and received an Outstanding Presentation Award at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in 2014. She also participated in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program.

A unicyclist who loves musicals and NPR, Weinstein is working on a thesis project in algebraic geometry with Dagan Karp, associate professor of mathematics. Weinstein says, “I would like to thank the Harvey Mudd Department of Mathematics and, in particular, Profs. Art Benjamin, Dagan Karp and Talithia Williams for their dedication to teaching and for making Mudd such a wonderful place to grow as a mathematician.” Her long-term goal is to earn a PhD in mathematics and teach at the university level.

Weinstein will join other award recipients to be recognized as a Schafer Prize honoree at the 2016 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle, Washington, January 6, 2016.