Welcome to Somerville Mathematics

Welcome to Somerville Mathematics, a blog devoted to exciting mathematical things happening in Somerville MA. I am the founder of The Somerville Mathematics Fund, www.Somervillemathematicsfund.org
The Math Fund was chartered to celebrate and encourage mathematics achievement in Somerville. I hope you will check out my TEDxSomerville talk on the Somerville Math Fund,
I find that there are many other interesting things happening mathematically in Somerville and I hope on this blog to have others share what they are doing. So please contact me at mathfund@gmail.com if you would like to contribute an article.
Erica

Monday, November 20, 2023

Time to get your Teacher Grant applications together!

 Every year the Somerville Mathematics Fund offers teacher grants for K-12 teachers in Somerville who have interesting and exciting ideas to support math learning and enrichment for their students.  The grant is open to teachers in all of the schools in Somerville, both public and parochial.  The grant application is on the Somerville Math Fund website and is due by January 7, 2024.

The maximum amount of any grant is $500 per year.  Previous winners are welcome to apply again as long as they have completed their report on the previous grant.  You can read about some previous year’s grant winners on the Somerville Math Fund blog or by requesting a copy of this year’s annual newsletter which was mailed in early December.

The Somerville Mathematics Fund, was chartered in 2000 to celebrate and encourage achievement in mathematics in the city of Somerville, Massachusetts.  Over twenty years, the math fund has awarded  $147,170  in teacher grants in the city of Somerville.  You might want to listen to our  TEDxSomerville talk on the work of the Somerville Math Fund to learn about the various things the math fund is doing.

In early April, the Somerville Math Fund will be seeking applications from students who reside in Somerville for college mathematics scholarships.

The teacher grant application is available on
https://somervillemathematicsfund.org/teacher-grants/

For more information, to volunteer or to make a tax-deductible contribution, please contact Erica (617-666-0666 or mathfund@gmail.com)

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Scrapheap Showdown: Marble Mayhem!




By Erica Dakin Voolich

On October 22, 18 high school students on six teams gathered in the Gantcher Gym at Tufts University to compete in the Somerville Math Fund’s 17th annual Scrapheap Showdown, Marble Mayhem.

Their challenge was to create a Rube-Goldberg device for marbles making creative use of triggers, jumps, loops, or elevators.  The “field” was two side by side tables held two feet apart.  One marble started its journey by being placed above one table at one corner and ended by stopping on the other table at the opposite corner.  Points were awarded according to how long the marble took to traverse the maze, how many obstacles and tricks it maneuvered through along the way, and consistency of time from start to finish.  Participants had up to five different sized marbles they could choose to use in their maze.

This year when the students arrived, the usual scrapheap pile included long pieces of foam core and wooden dowels along with the miscellaneous interesting “junk” that the Somerville Math Fund pile usually includes.  

The contestants were very busy, planning and trying different ideas, making adjustments while testing with their marbles.  One team succeeded in jumping and catching their marble from table to table.

Another team built what looked like pin ball machine, triggering multiple marbles.

A couple of teams had paths with zig-zagging paths downhill. 

 It was fun to watch each of the marble structures being tested everyone hoping their marbles would do what they planned for them to do and to do it in a timely manner.  Time was called after 3 hours. It was time for testing the different structures.  


The first place team was “Super Seniors” (Yasmin Nazhar, Atticus Borggaard, and Ellery Borggaard) with a score of 1095 points.  



Second place was “Slurm Gang” (Miles Eisenbraun, Alexander Moulton, and Robert Leoni)) with 1030 points.  



Third place was “Tech Titans” (Ali El-Saudi, Christopher Montiel, and Julian Barney) with 180 points. 

Fourth place was “Calculus Crusaders” (Liam Beretsky-Jewell and Darragh Keane) with 130 points.


The teams chose their prizes in the order they finished.  The prizes donated were three sets of two tickets to the RedSox (donated by Sam Voolich) for a game in April 2024, three $100 Target gift cards (donated by Chase Duclos-Orsello),  and 3 gift cards from Anna’s Taqueria (donated by long term Somerville Math Fund supporters).

The other participating teams were the “The Rats AAAAHHRRERRHHHH”  (Serena Wong, Rafael Ronen, and Bhavroop Kaur), and “The LEDS”  (Lily Thompson, Elias Colley, and Dash Brenner).



Designers and refiners of the challenge were members of the Somerville Math Fund Board: Fred Bernardin, Sanford Bogage, Adam Foster, Richard Graf, Dan Oshima, Jesse Stern, Erica Voolich, Susan Weiss.  Amy Weiss designed the teeshirt and Monica Fernandes designed the sponsor flyer; and Susan and Sanford designed the student recruiting and registration materials, and Sanford managed registration and the Google Classroom for this event.


Michael Morgan and Patricia Murphy-Sheehy (Head of Math Department) at Somerville High helped with suggestions and distribution help of registration materials.  The math teachers at Somerville High School, recruited student teams.  Bill Trudell videoed the event for Somerville Cable EdTV Channel 15.

Again Tufts University was our wonderful host donating their gym space for a Sunday event.  Last year was our first year back after a three year COVID hiatus. This was our 17th Scrapheap Showdown and Tufts has been our host for all of these events.  

Thanks to our generous sponsors, this activity was both a fund raiser for a scholarship and three teacher grants, provided prizes for the students and allowed the students to participate without paying any registration fee.  We offered different levels of sponsorship for the event.  Thanks to all of our wonderful donors whose donations will make one scholarship available next spring and four teacher grants in January.



Gold Level (one year of a college scholarship each):

Commercial Cleaning Co./Bickoff Family, Jasper J. Lawson, PhD. & Associates, Julie Schneider, and Tufts University.

Silver Level (one teacher grant each):

East Cambridge Savings Bank, Mr. & Mrs. Donald F. McGoldrick, Winter Hill Bank and a long term sponsor.

Bronze Level (supporting Somerville Math Fund work):Chase Duclos-Orsello, A Member of the Somerville High School Faculty, Zbigniew Niticki, and Sam Voolich.



The Somerville Mathematics Fund was chartered in 2000 to celebrate and encourage mathematics achievement in Somerville.  On January 7th, we will be looking for teacher grant applications; and in April, we will be looking for scholarship applications.   For more information or to volunteer or to make a donation, call 617-666-0666, e-mail mathfund@gmail.com, or go to www.somervillemathematicsfund.org.

The link to this page is https://somervillemathematics.blogspot.com/2023/10/scrapheap-showdown-marble-mayhem.html


©Erica Dakin Voolich 2023

Saturday, September 16, 2023

Scrapheap is Coming -- Time to Sign Up!

  

Scrapheap Showdown is Coming ... time to get your teams together.  Get two more friends and register your team.  Choose a crazy name for the team and then all come on October 22nd to Tufts U Gantcher Center.

After two years off for the Pandemic, Scrapheap Showdown came back last year.  Here is the video of last year's Scrapheap Showdown, Good Vibrations.


The Somerville Math Fund's annual high school engineering challenge is coming on Sunday October 23rd.  It will be held at the Gantcher Center at Tufts University.  Sign-in is at noon.  

But you must register before online here before October 6th.

Teams of three will arrive to discover what will be their challenge to build this year.  If you're interested in seeing some of the previous years' projects.


To compete you must be a high school student living in Somerville MA. Click here to register online.  Somerville high school students are encouraged to register and participate.

Start organizing your team NOW, the registration is due on October 6th.

In the past, the teams not only came up with creative names for their teams, but they also came up with interesting creative solutions to the annual challenges.  We always have great prizes.

Go forth and form your teams of three!

Scrapheap Showdown is Coming ... time to get your teams together.  Get two more friends and register your team.  Choose a crazy name for the team and then all come on October 23rd to Tufts U Gantcher Center.

Good Luck!



The link to this post ishttps://somervillemathematics.blogspot.com/2023/09/scrapheap-is-coming-time-to-sign-up.html

Friday, June 9, 2023


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

This link to this blog post is hhttps://somervillemathematics.blogspot.com/2023/06/pictured-above-are-sanford-bogage-smf.html




Friday, March 17, 2023

Math Meet, Pi, Pizza, and finally Pies —A Great Renewed way to Celebrate a Transcendental Number

 by Erica Voolich

Tuesday, March 14 is Pi Day (3.14).  What better excuse is there to have a celebration of math with middle schoolers than π?     On the Eve of Pi Day, over 100 students, teachers, and high school Math Club members celebrated π  at Somerville High School by eating pizza while spending an afternoon taking a math contest and then estimating, creating, answering questions, and ending with Table Talk pies for everyone. 

The Somerville High School Math Club led by Michael Morgan organized the event.  Instead of the usual math contest between Somerville’s middle schools’ math teams for the month of March, they invited the schools to come and have students take a math contest related to pi and circles written by the high schoolers and do some of the pi night activities the Somerville Math Fund has organized in the past pre-pandemic.  

While enjoying pizza donated by the Bickoff family of the Commercial Cleaning Service, the students from the students from the Healey School, the East Somerville Community School,  the West Somerville Neighborhood school and the Kennedy School went around to a variety of pi math activities set up in the Lower Cafeteria at the High School.  

These activities included: predicting bicycle wheel roll distance after two revolutions, a guessing contest, π button design, π facts quiz, finding your birthday in π, drawing a cardioid or nephroid (curves from lines), and predicting circumferences in mm by feel of objects in mystery boxes.

Even though the Somerville Math Fund sponsored math night event was canceled by the pandemic for the last three years, there were Somerville High School Math Club members who commented about remembering doing some of these events when they went over to either the Healey (2019) or the East Somerville (2018) for the Pi Family math night.

Scott Weaver (East), Wil Jacques (Healey) brought students and helped Erica Voolich (Somerville Mathematics Fund) organize the activities for the event.  Also bringing students were Annalyica Beck-Liston from East, Alyssa Mackey from West, and Veronica Santana from Kennedy.

In addition, Scott Weaver at the East Somerville Community School organized a day of math/pi activities in all of his classes on Pi Day. All of his students enjoyed Table Talk Pies to fuel their exploration of Pi and circles.  Somerville had a rainy nor’easter for pi day while the rest of New England was buried in a spring snow (in some places measured in feet) and probably had to postpone their celebrations with the thousands of pies supplied by Table Talk

Table Talk Pies of Worcester generously supplied small pies for all who came that afternoon.  Table Talk has generously supported this Somerville Math Fund event for nineteen years (2 years off for Covid). When planning the first SMF π Night in 2003; the Math Fund called the Table Talk Pi Company and explained what π day was and Table Talk generously donated large pies for prizes and small pies for everyone.  Twenty-one years later, Table Talk Pies is not only still donating to the Somerville Pi night celebration, but also to many more celebrations.   This year Table Talk donated about 68,000 pies to schools and organizations celebrating pi day.

A big thank you to all the Math Club volunteers and donors who made this fun, educational event possible.  It takes a community to celebrate π day!

The Somerville Mathematics Fund, was founded in 2000 with the mission to celebrate and encourage mathematics achievement in Somerville, MA.  They also award renewable college mathematics scholarships; applications will be due in early April.  For more information, to make a donation, or to volunteer, visit www.somervillemathematicsfund.org or mathfund@gmail.com or call 617-666-0666.


Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Have a Great Idea on How to Teach Math? These Teachers Do!

 Many teachers have great ideas on how to make their classrooms a better place for their students to learn math.  The teachers’ ideas frequently outrun the budget schools have for supplies and their own ability to subsidize their classroom.  The Somerville Mathematics Fund tries to fill this need through the generosity of their donors with grants up to $500.  

William Kuhlman, James Dean Foundation, Mr & Mrs Donald McGoldrick each sponsored multiple grants. The East Cambridge Savings Bank, Jeremy Gale, Lali & Jay Haines, Jay & Jasper, William Kuhlman, Philip Parsons, Spring Hill Dental, Tufts University, Winter Hill Bank and Rebecca Wood-Spagnoli each sponsored a teacher's grant.  The rest of the grants were funded thanks to the combined generosity of everyone who contributed to the Math Fund’s annual fundraiser.  The following teachers won grants to encourage and support mathematics achievement in the classrooms of Somerville.

These Teacher Grants were funded by the many generous donors who together contributed enough in our annual  fundraiser to support all of them.  There is power in donations of many sizes coming together to support the larger whole.  Thank you to our annual donors.

• Matthew Burch, Argenziano School (Math Instructional Coach K-8), Math instructional materials.

• Amanda Oppman, Healey School (Community Schools Site Coordinator After-School), Math Plus After-School Club 3rd-6th.

• Paula O’Sullivan, Swetha Kalluri & Jenna DiNovis, District-wide Math Interventionists, (K-8), Math Manipulatives.

• Katie Starbuck, Healey School and East Somerville Community School (Math Coach), Materials to Support Math Classes.


The Math Fund wants to thank the James Dean Foundation for generously underwriting the following teacher grants:

• Nicole Alimena, Healey School (5th, SEI-1), Math Station Manipulatives.

• Sabrina Boy-Arruda, Healey School (5th Math), Create Math Stations.

• Andrea Carcamo, Healey School (Dual Language Pre-K), Math Manipulatives.

• Susanne Douglas, Healey School (K), Math Activity Centers.

• Julie Gallardo, Healey School (4th SEI-1), Math Workshop and Intervention Materials.


The Math Fund wants to thank each of the following for generously underwriting a teacher grant:

East Cambridge Savings Bank:

• Dolores Theolien, Healey School (1st), Take Home Math Materials.

Jeremy Gale:

• Johanna Cooney, Brown School (1st), STEM bin materials.

Lali and Jay Haines:

• Michael Morgan, Somerville High School (AP Statistics), Numworks Calculators.

Jay and Jasper:

• Meredith Rothstein, Winter Hill Community Innovation School (3rd-5th, Autism), Math Manipulatives.

William Kuhlman:

• Jessica Anaya, East Somerville Community School (K), Math Manipulatives.

• Naina Sood Fox, East Somerville Community School (5th Math & Science), Fraction & Decimal Manipulatives.

Mr & Mrs. Donald McGoldrick:

• Debra Dixon & Jacquelyn Berkowitz, Winter Hill Community Innovation School (Library and SMILE Pre-K), STEM Books.

• Molly Harrington, Argenziano School (2nd SEI Inclusion), Math Enrichment and Intervention Materials.

Philip Parsons:

• Mary-Kate Pereira, Argenziano School (K, SEI-1), Math Manipulatives.

Spring Hill Dental

• Roxane Scrima, Kennedy School (K), Math Games and Manipulatives.

Tufts University:

• Alyssa Mackey, West Somerville Neighborhood School (7th & 8th Math), Support for Differentiated Materials.

Winter Hill Bank:

• Andrea Palmer, Winter Hill Community Innovation School (K-8 Math Coach), Support Materials for K-8 Math and Multi-Lingual Teachers.

Rebecca Wood-Spagnoli:

• Julie Jones, Lauren McGlashing, Shayna Goggin, Molly Dickerson, Jessica DaSilva, & Mallory Crane, Capuano School (K), Kindergarten Math Day.


The Somerville Mathematics Fund was chartered in 2000 to celebrate and encourage achievement in mathematics in the city of Somerville, Massachusetts.  Over twenty-three years, the Somerville Math Fund has awarded $140,711 in teacher grants supporting three hundred seventy-two teachers’ projects in the city of Somerville along with emergency grants to East Somerville teachers after the devastating school fire.

On April 7th, the fund will be seeking applications from students who reside in Somerville for college mathematics scholarships.  Over twenty-three years, the Somerville Math Fund has awarded a total of $559,000 in four-year mathematics scholarships to one hundred eighteen students.  Links to the scholarship application form is available at  www.somervillemathematicsfund.org   For more information, to volunteer or to make a tax-deductible contribution, please contact Erica Voolich (617-666-0666 or mathfund@gmail.com).

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