The 2025 PME conference is pleased to host Dr Lauren Rose from Bard College.
Dr. Lauren Rose is a mathematics professor at Bard College. Her research areas include algebraic combinatorics, finite geometry, and recreational math. She enjoys mentoring students in both research and outreach, and is the inventor of several mathematical games. She has held leadership roles in the Math Circle and Undergraduate Research communities, is a member of the MoMath advisory council, and in 2022 was made a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics. She is passionate about making deep mathematics fun and accessible to diverse populations.
Friday Evening Talk
Quads: A SET-like Game With a Twist
Quads is a card game similar to SET, with 81 cards, each containing 1-4 objects in one of 4 colors and one of 4 shapes. The goal of the game is to find “quads”, which are sets of 4 cards that satisfy a particular pattern. We will explore several mathematical properties of this game, including the question of how many cards you must lay down to guarantee a quad.
Saturday Morning Talk
Avoiding Triples in the Card game Spot It!
Spot It! is a card game where each card has 8 symbols and shares exactly one symbol with every other card. A standard Spot It! deck can be viewed as the projective plane of order 7. My undergraduate research group began by creating Spot It! decks for projective planes of order n ≤ 16. For each deck, we studied sets of cards where each symbol appears at most twice. We will describe the process of finding research problems related to the game, followed by results and work in progress.
