Pi Mu Epsilon Conference

Friday and Saturday, April 11-12, 2025

Spring 2025 Conference Speaker: Ben Orlin

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Ben Orlin, a.k.a. “the Math with Bad Drawings guy” is responsible for several thousand math jokes and four math books. They include Change is the Only Constant, Math Games with Bad Drawings, and Math for English Majors. His debut book Math with Bad Drawings has sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Popular Science, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught middle and high school, and currently teaches at Saint Paul College.

Friday, April 11 (8pm, tentatively)

Math Games (and Why They Matter): A decade ago, at a math department picnic, I stumbled across a strange and compelling variation on tic-tac-toe. Since then, over all my protests and resistance, math games have made a slow conquest of my professional life. What makes games so potent and compelling? We’ll explore a variety of examples, from a press-your-luck dice game to a quantified trivia game — and ask what each reveals about the interwoven powers of reason and imagination.

Saturday, April 12 (10:30am, tentatively)

The Entirety of Higher Mathematics in 13 Puzzles: You have been told that mathematics is a vast galaxy, that it sprawls beyond human cognizability, that the last person to grasp even half of its scope was Poincaré, now dead for a century. Lies, all lies! Math is a civilizational wrestling match against a handful of elementary puzzles. Nothing more. I shall humbly introduce these puzzles; the rest of mathematics is left as an exercise for the listener.

Former Conference Speakers