Several Riverside students were accepted into a SFU math program, “A Taste of Pi”, and attended their first university lecture on Saturday, October 17.
“A Taste of Pi” is a monthly series of talks organized by the mathematics department with support from the faculty of science at SFU for students in grades 10 and 11 who have shown talent and strong interests in these areas.
This year, 11 Riverside students were accepted into the program from Ms. Erica McArthur’s classes. To get into “A Taste of Pi”, the student must have a math teacher’s recommendation along with an application sent through fax.
“The intention is to provide university style lectures to high school students with high school accessible content to introduce high school students to what university style learning is like,” said McArthur. “What I think the students like the most is that it opens their eyes to topics in mathematics that they might not have been exposed to in high school.”
On October 17, students attended their first lectures from Dr. Alejandro Erickson and Professor Joan Sharp. This month’s lectures were titled, “Make a discovery with Tatami tiles” and “Life’s origin and the nature of life on Earth”.
“I really liked the first lecture about the Tatami tiles,” said grade 10 student Daisy Choi, who attended the event. “It was very interactive and interesting with lots of puzzles to solve along the way.”
This program takes place in the fall as well as the spring and consists of three Saturday meetings in the months of October, November and December. Each meeting contains two lectures from university professors per day, one in the field of mathematics and one in the field of sciences.
The “Taste of Pi” series has gone on for many years now, with the twenty-fourth session this fall. Students will be attending two more sessions this year on November 14 and December 5.

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