Pictured above are Sanford Bogage (SMF VP), Ariyeh Weissman-Bennett, David Ou, Jonathan Chan, Veid Patel, Hashem El-Saudi, Erica Voolich (SMF Pres.), Wendy Guo, Nyemma DeAndrade, Lia Sokol, Nicole López Ordóñez, Ashish Budha, Andrew Bonney.  Not pictured Fenya Savage Mantell.

By Erica Dakin Voolich

The Somerville Mathematics Fund is pleased to announce the winners of their renewable mathematics scholarships for 2023.  The Math Fund was founded to celebrate and encourage math achievement and these students deserve to be celebrated for their work in math and science while in high school. Thanks to the generosity of many individuals and a few organizations, this year we were able to award a record 12 scholarships, totaling $72,000 over four years.

Due to a COVID-19 outbreak, we were unable to personally award the scholarships at the awards night for four years.  It felt so wonderful to be back personally handing out the scholarships and meeting the winners in person again like we used to do.  It is also wonderful to see so many first generation college students in our group this year, a total of eight!

We definitely want to celebrate our scholarship winners for their achievements while meeting the challenges of going to high school, much of it was during a pandemic. CONGRATULATIONS.  

The winners are attending a variety of schools next fall.  Andrew Bonney and Jonathan Chan will be attending UMass Boston; Ashish Budha, Northeastern U; Nyemma DeAndrade and Wendy Guo, Bryn Mawr College; Hashem El-Saudi and Fenya Savage Mantell, Tufts U; Nicole López Ordóñez and David Ou, Boston U; Veid Patel, MIT; Lia Sokol, U of Maryland; and Ariyeh Weissmann-Bennett, UMass Amherst.

A bit of explanation about the scholarship names.  Some scholarships are supported by many donations, some large, some small — but together there is $6000 for each student.  For those students who participated in Scrapheap Showdown this year, we had some of our sponsors who each sponsored one year of a scholarship.  We have some named annual scholarships, two memorial scholarships are for founders of the Somerville Math Fund.  Two of our named scholarships are given by one of our first scholarship winners back in 2001 in the name of his favorite famous mathematician.  One is given in memory of a mother who distinguished herself in WW2 as a nurse and saved for her children’s education. And, finally, one is given in honor of a distinguished Tufts Math professor and Somerville Math Fund Board member who retired from each this year.

Their annual scholarships of $1500 are renewable for up to a total of four years as long as they maintain a B average and take mathematics or courses which use mathematics.  

The five memorial scholarships this year are for  Dr. Alice T  Schafer, Lt. Catherine M. Landers, S. Ramanujan, and Michael Voolich.  The honor scholarship is for Dr. Zbigniew Nitecki

One of the scholarships was given in the memory of an outstanding woman mathematician, Dr. Alice T. Schafer.  Nicole López Ordóñez  was awarded the Alice T. Schafer Memorial Scholarship. Nicole was busy with the Calculus Project, Math Club, Robotics team, Fablab, and Science League while in high school.  She loved the STEM problem solving challenges as she branched out to try new activities.

Nicole is planning on majoring in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.

Dr. Schafer (1915 - 2009) was orphaned as an infant and raised by two aunts.  When she went to college at the University of Richmond of Virginia, women students weren’t allowed in the library and she was discouraged from majoring in mathematics.  She won prizes, earned a PhD, taught at colleges (including Wellesley) and among the things she is known for is helping start the Association for Women in Mathematics (1971).  

Less known about Dr. Schafer was her role helping to start the Somerville Mathematics Fund in 2000 -- attending all of the planning meetings and contributing to their work as long as she was able.  She is remembered for her passion and work to insure mathematical opportunities for women. Nicole loved teaching what she learned in math initially at home and then to others.  Then she discovered that math was more than just an answer to a do-now problem but an innovative way to solve problems as an engineer would.  It opened a whole new world to her.

Since Dr. Schafer was committed to the education and supporting women in mathematics, Nicole’s majoring in biomedical engineering is a wonderful way to honor Dr. Alice Schafer's memory of encouraging women in the maths and sciences.

The Lt. Catherine M. Landers Memorial Scholarship was awarded to Wendy Guo.  Wendy has an interest in becoming a neurologist.  Her interest in health care is part of her larger interest in human rights, social justice, and healthcare for minorities.

When Lt. Landers (1920 - 2012) wanted to go to nursing school (graduating in 1942), her grandmother opened a cedar chest were she had been saving one dollar bills one at a time to help pay for her granddaughter’s education.  Lt Landers won a Bronze Star for her service during WW2, where she ran a field hospital outside Paris; she was about to be shipped to the far East when WW2 ended and so she boarded a transport ship for the USA instead.   Jay Landers and Jasper Lawson donated a scholarship in her memory, honoring her commitment to education.

Wendy Guo’s interest is in neurology and the theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain. A Neuroscience major at Bryn Mawr College is a wonderful way to honor Lt. Landers' commitment to education.

Our two scholarships in the memory of S. Ramanujan, are a gift from the Jha Family and were awarded to Hashem El-Saudi who is planning on attending Tufts University and Veid Patel who is planning on attending MIT.  Each has been a member of the Somerville High School Math Club, that has organized math meets and group problem solving of puzzles and activities for middle school students and participated in math contests.  

Hashem followed the example of his sister years ago joining the math club and was the president of the Math Club this year. He was involved in redesigning the format for the math meets. He spent two summers interning in a brain tumor cancer research Lab at Dana-Farber/Harvard Center. He wants to be a pediatric psychologist.  He is planning on majoring in neurology at Tufts.

Veid is interested in and fascinated how the universe works — how the math constants and formulas can explain the real world in a way that language failed to.  Veid wants to be an astrophysicist and is planning on majoring in physics at MIT. He spent time last summer at the Momentum AI program at MIT and the summer before at Lesley’s AI, Art and Robotics program. 

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 - 1920) was a mostly self-taught brilliant Indian mathematician who sadly died young.  He discovered his love of mathematics while in high school when he found a book that listed 4000 mathematical theorems without information on they were discovered or developed. So he continued his math work, often on a slate, only recording his concluding theorem on paper when finished, without the details of how he came to the conclusion.  With his humble beginnings and no formal mathematical training, the story of his life and how he finally connected with the well-known mathematicians of his day is detailed the book and movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity. That book inspired the Jha family who gave this scholarship in his honor. Ramanujan’s notebooks and papers have included both previously discovered and new mathematical theorems many in number theory.  These notebooks have continued to provide mathematicians with material to study and try to figure out how Ramanujan discovered these theorems and to see if they were provable.  

The sponsor of this scholarship was inspired by S. Ramanujan as a high school student more than twenty years ago. Hashem’s and Veid’s interesting in how their love of math can help explain the world of neurology and physics is a way to honor S. Ramanujan’s memory.  S. Ramanujan was self taught before he finally connected with the mathematicians in England and worked at the University of Cambridge with the leading mathematicians of  the day.  

The Michael Voolich Memorial Scholarship was awarded to Nyemma DeAndrade who is interested majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology at Bryn Mawr College.  

Michael Voolich (1943 - 2019) was a person who was interested in how everything worked, if Renaissance man was a job offering, Michael would have applied. He learned by asking questions and then he loved telling everyone what he had learned and how seemingly disparate things were related.  He had a career than included teaching many different subjects in local schools, none of which was math. But, he married a math teacher.  So, when the Somerville Math Fund was being discussed and organized in his living room, of course he joined the founding board.  

He liked to do things for people and of course for the math fund.  His telephone calls and trips to Table Talk Pie Company each year for city-wide Pi Night celebration were a highlight each year. He especially loved helping find things for others to donate for the Scrapheap Showdown each year and his marvelous multiple clamps will still be a necessary part of future Scrapheap challenges to come.  

Michael loved to be able to give and help others in the local community along with his extended family here and abroad. This scholarship was funded by the many people who donated in his memory to the Somerville Math Fund.  

During Nyemma’s junior year she took a dual enrollment class between Somerville High School and Cambridge College — it was all hands on and inspired her to major in science and engineering.  Michael would have loved this class, he taught various industrial arts classes over the years and would be thrilled Nyemma had the experience and would want her to tell him all about it. 

The Scholarship in honor of  Dr. Zbigniew Nitecki was awarded to Andrew Bonney who is interested majoring in computer Science at UMass Boston.  The ability to create something out of basically nothing,  hooked him on computer science in his AP computer science class, and led him to participate in a cyber security hackathon challenge finding and correcting vulnerabilities in websites.

Dr Nitecki recently retired from Tufts University after 50 years of service teaching math, he is now Emeritus.  He also served on the Somerville Math Fund board for fourteen years from 2008 to 2022, also retiring from the Board last fall.

Dr. Nitecki is a mathematician working in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. He has been on the faculty at Tufts University since 1972; previously he taught at Yale and the City College of New York. Besides papers in research journals, he has written four books: Differentiable Dynamics (MIT Press, 1971: Russian translation 1975, Chinese 1979), First Course in Differential Equations co-authored with Marty Guterman (Saunders, 1984, 1988, 1992), was used by many departments (including Tufts) as the text for the last math course most engineers take. Calculus Deconstructed, A Second Course in First Year Calculus (MAA, 2009), and Calculus in 3D: Geometry, Vectors, and Multivariate Calculus (MAA, 2018).  In 1982-3, he served as the first director of the Geometric Analysis program at the National Science Foundation. He has served on the editorial board of two journals: Real Analysis Exchange and Qualitative Theory of Dynamical Systems. He has served as Associate Treasurer of the American Mathematical Society since February 2012. 

Andrew’s interest in completing all the math and computer science classes in a dual enrollment at Bunker Hill Community College while still at Somerville High School makes him a good match to Dr Niteck’s many calculus books.

For years, we have held a high school engineering challenge in October that is both a hands-on problem solving event for the participants but also a fundraiser for scholarships.

The Scrapheap Showdown last October had three gold sponsors who each sponsored one year of a Somerville Math Fund Scholarship.  The other three years of these scholarships were made possible by many generous donors contributing to the Somerville Math Fund.  

Three of the donors who each paid for one year of three different student scholarship were Julie Schneider, the Bickoff Family, and Winter Hill Bank.  The Somerville Math Fund Scholarship, generously sponsored by three sponsors of Scrapheap Showdown were awarded to Ashish Budha, Jonathan Chan, and David Ou.

The scholarship whose first  year was sponsored by Julie Schneider was awarded to Ashish Budha.  Ashish plans to study computer science at Northeastern University.  When he was in 10th grade he first heard someone talk of coding as something to create games, apps, and software.  YouTube and Google explained what coding was and he was hooked on the problem solving challenges of programming as started with his first class in 11th grade.  Ashish is interested in how groundbreaking technology can further human life experience.

The scholarship whose first year was sponsored by the Bickoff family of the Commercial Cleaning Company was awarded to Jonathan Chan.

Jonathan plans to study finance at UMass Boston.  While taking a business class, he was captivated by the idea that he could manage his own finances, and then realized the world is run by money and it is more than just earning and spending.  Having a healthy relationship to money is important, so going into finance seemed to be the thing for Jonathan to do.

The scholarship whose first year was sponsored by Winter Hill Bank was awarded to David Ou.

David plans to study computer science at Boston University.  David was a math tutor and peer mentor for the Calculus Project and spent last summer at MIT studying artificial intelligence (AI) and building a reCaptcha solver AI from scratch. He is interested in how computer science can be applied to autonomous cars and robotics.  He has a concern with accompanying ethical issues with biased machine training, data security and deep fakes. David is interesting in studying computer science, specifically AI and the accompanying issues related to it.

The Somerville Mathematics Fund receives donations from many people — many small, medium and larger donations that together make a difference.  If you sent $5, $50, or $500, for example, you contributed to fund to be even more scholarships to be awarded.  When we have $6,000 donated, we can give another scholarship.  And last in our list, but definitely not least in any way, are three more scholarships that were made up of gifts from many donors.  If you donated, thank you.  Pat yourself on the back.

From the generosity of many comes each of these three whole scholarships which were awarded to Fenya Savage Mantell, Lia Sokol, and Ariyeh Weissman-Bennett.

A Somerville Mathematics Fund Scholarship was awarded to Fenya Savage Mantell.

Fenya plans to study data science at Tufts University.  In high school Fenya advocated for the Green New Deal and climate education in schools and was pushing for accessibility and equity in access to technology and climate friendly initiatives. She is interested in the relationship between computer science, ethics, policy and philosophy — the ethics in programming applications and the implications of AI and technology. 

A Somerville Mathematics Fund Scholarship was awarded to Lia Sokol.

Lia plans on studying psychology at U of Maryland.  She joined the robotics team while still busy with many other volunteer activities. Lia has been involved for many years volunteering with children — from playing with pre-school children in a domestic violence shelter, helping with Argenziano’s after school program, and at a summer camp for low-income and special needs kids during a COVID summer. So, it is not a surprise that she sees herself involved with education in a STEM field or counseling in the future.

A Somerville Mathematics Fund Scholarship was awarded to Ariyeh Weissman-Bennett

Ariyeh plans on studying at the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst.  Ariyeh is interested in so many things that he wants to explore in college, that he isn’t ready to narrow his studies to a major yet. Stay tuned for updates from him when we ask for “news from scholarship winners” in the Somerville Math Fund annual newsletter, Imagination!

The Somerville Mathematics Fund was chartered in 2000 to celebrate and encourage achievement in mathematics in the city of Somerville, Massachusetts. It May 2011, it was recognized as the outstanding Dollars for Scholars Chapter in New England.  Since its founding in 2000, it has awarded $631,000 in four-year mathematics scholarships to one hundred thirty outstanding Somerville students.  

©2023, Erica Dakin Voolich

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