Math Club
Welcome to the UIC Undergraduate Math Club page for AY 2026-2027!
The Math Club meets on Wednesday (12-1pm) in SEO 1227. Anyone can drop by. The first meeting of the fall 2026 term will be September 9th!
If you are interested in participating in student activities or giving a short (10- to 45-minute) math-related presentation, please speak with a member of the board at any club meeting.
Additionally, Putnam Competition preparation will take place this term on Mondays from 3-4pm in SEO 512 starting September 14th. The 87th Putnam Competition will take place on Saturday, December 5th, 2026. This is a one-day written competition for all students in North America. Please email Matthew Harrison-Trainor (mht@uic.edu) if you are interested. You can come to the practice session without entering the competition, or enter the competition without coming to the practices sessions. If you are not sure, come to the first practice session and find out about the contest.
Math Club Advisors: Greg Taylor, Danko Adrovic, Wouter Van Limbeek, Jing Wang
Putnam Faculty Supervisors: Matthew Harrison-Trainor (Chair), Evangelos Kobotis, Gilberto Simpson
Upcoming Lectures
MATH Club: Singularities and Blowups, by Greg Taylor
MATH Club: Analytic Solutions for D-optimal Designs under Generalized Linear Models, by Jie Yang
Former Lectures
2025-2026 Lectures
Spring 2026
January 26 – Nathan Jones – Fibonnaci numbers and linear algebra
February 2 – Andre De Moura – Tilting at Windmills: a Gateway to Factoring in Exotic Number Systems
February 9 – Greg Taylor – Generatingfunctionology
February 23 – Hassan Babaei – What is turbulence, and how does energy cascade across scales in water flows, storms, and solar winds
March 9 – Nick Hanson – The hyperbolic plane
March 16 – Sacha L’Heveder – A topological proof of the infinitude of primes & dynamics on arithmetic progressions
April 6 – Darius Alizadeh – The mathematics of Doble/Spot it
April 20 – Hita Bharwad – Euclidean plane tilings
April 27 – Wouter Van Limbeek – A Tale of Two Matrices
Fall 2025
September 3 – Nathan Jones – The Twin Prime Conjecture
September 10 – Thomas Insley – Sets, Russell’s Paradox, and Classes
September 17 – Yija Chen – Game Theory in Guts Poker
September 24 – Symbols of Inclusion – Applying to Grad School Panel
October 1 – Evangelos Kobotis – Simple groups: mathematics and the book of Job
October 8 – Matthew Harrison-Trainor – Konig’s lemma and compactness
October 15 – Wouter Van Limbeek – The Banach-Tarski paradox, pyramid schemes, and non-amendable groups
October 22 – Hassan Babaei – Modeling Traffic Flow with PDEs
October 29 – Drew Shulman – Euler’s Evaluation of Infinite Series
November 5 – Greg Taylor – An invitation to algebraic geometry via plane curves
November 12 – Symbols of Inclusion – Panel on REUs (Research Experiences for Undergrads)
November 19 – Osama Khalil – What is ergodic theory?
December 3 – Clayton Mizgerd – Geometric problems with random methods