Life at MA

By Danny Shapiro '28 in Spring 2025

“This is one of my favorite nights of the year,” Frank Cassano, the math department chair, tells the crowd gathered in the BBLC lecture hall for April’s Math Night. An MA tradition older than COD, Math Night is unique. It allows students to explore numbers in ways not always possible during class. First, seniors Kailan Robinson and Calin Blodgett take to the stage to explain the “probability of probabilities” with Amazon product reviews. Contrary to conventional wisdom, they show that having tens of thousands of reviews does not guarantee that a product will provide the best possible experience. 

The second group–sophomores Keo Robinson, Caroline Lane, and Aggie Robinson–explore why ChatGPT struggles to do mathematics. As Lane puts it, “it's programmed…[to output] whatever sounds right…while this works well for drafting an email, it does not work well for solving complex and abstract math problems.”

Next, juniors Julian Roley-Shirani and Griffin Reid explain “the power of cryptography” to the crowd. The presentation culminates with a demonstration of the importance of strong passwords.

Juniors Gordon Sarratt and Yuqin Li investigate the art of Wikiracing. Sarratt and Li explore everything from the connection between science teacher Emily Willingham and the 2000 World Series to computer science algorithms, which ultimately gives audience members a distinct understanding of how to cheat at the encyclopedic game.

“Consider these three sentences: Frank eats jam, Frank is in a traffic jam, and Frank likes to jam on guitar,” says Senior Matthieu Giauque, standing next to his partners Tyler Hankman and Miles Schulist. The group explained how large language models (LLMs) use 12,000-dimensional vectors and matrices to infer what words mean based on context.

In his opening notes, Cassano touches on the significance of the event. “This has nothing tied to a grade…this is all on [the presenters] just volunteering to do it because of pure passion or joy.” Presenting at Math Night guarantees a fascinating, personally pertinent mathematical exploration without the pressure to get a high grade. The result is something truly authentic.