Teens in grades 9-12 - sign up for the April Teen Science Café with CU Science Discovery. Our guest speaker is an applied mathematician, Dr. Nancy Rodriguez. While she loves math, she also loves using math to solve really important problems, ranging from conservation biology to predicting where political protests might occur. She has written papers about everything from segregation to how bacteria move, tying it all together with math. Come ready to be convinced that what you’re doing in high school calculus is more interesting than you’d imagined! We’ll make our own mathematical models to predict the course of the pandemic, and of course--eat pizza! 

Background
Have you ever thought about why crime happens where it does? Or why a certain kind of animal spends time in some places and not others? If you were going to study these things, maybe you’d start with a map and put markers where crimes have happened or where animals can be found. But what would you need on those maps to understand why those crimes took place or why the animals were there? And how could you predict if there would be more or fewer crimes or animals in those locations in the future? The answer is in Calculus, the mathematics of change. 

About the Café
Join us upstairs in the seating area at the North end of the Library near the Makerspace. Every month we'll have a lively discussion covering a topic on the cutting edge of science and culture. Register for any that you would like to attend!