UNM hosts Carnegie Mellon Professor Po Shen Loh as part of UNM PNM Math Contest

The University of New Mexico hosts Carnegie Mellon University Professor Po-Shen Loh, who will deliver two special events Feb. 7-8 as part of the UNM-PNM Math Contest.

Loh is a social entrepreneur and inventor, working across the spectrum of mathematics, education, and healthcare all around the world. He is a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University and served a decade-long term as the national coach of the USA International Mathematical Olympiad team from 2013-2023. He has pioneered innovations ranging from a scalable way to learn challenging math live online at comparable engagement to live-streaming entertainment to a new way to control pandemics by leveraging self-interest.

Loh will be on the UNM's campus to deliver a special colloquium and public lecture on how to use math and innovative thinking to tackle global challenges in education, healthcare, and the rapidly advancing age of AI.

The special colloquium will be held on Friday, Feb. 7, from 4-5 p.m. in the SMLC 102 and via Zoom. The colloquium, titled "Using Math to Invent Solutions to Large-Scale Human Problems in Education and Healthcare," will explore Loh's groundbreaking innovations in leveraging math and technology to revolutionize healthcare and shape the future of education while inspiring the next generation of mathematicians.

The next day he will host a public lecture to students in the morning before they participate in the UNM-PNM Math Contest. It is a tradition at the University to host a public lecture by a renowned mathematician before the test. Loh will be delivering a message titled, "How to Thrive In the Age of AI."

"We are extremely fortunate to have Professor Po-Shen Loh from Carnegie Mellon University as the UNM-PNM Math Contest Public Lecture speaker," said Stephen Lau, associate professor and co-director of the UNM-PNM Math Contest.

"Professor Loh will have an agenda full of activities, visiting several Title I middle schools in Santa Fe and Albuquerque to engage young minds in mathematics, facilitating the first Math Teachers Circle of the semester, and delivering two exciting public lectures at UNM touching on Education and Healthcare, and AI," said Cristina Pereyra, professor & co-director of the UNM-PNM Math Contest.

Both events are open to the general public, staff, faculty, students, alumni, and family.

"Why are we learning this?" - the dreaded question often received by math professors.

In this colloquium, Loh will share his story of using his math-professor background to devise new solutions to two practical problems that affect our whole society: disease control and education. His original research specialty was combinatorics, and both graph theory and game theory feature as inspirations in his work.

During the COVID lockdown, he invented an app which solves the incentive misalignment problem intrinsic in contact tracing: in the traditional approach, people are asked to isolate to protect others against infection, not to save themselves.

He has also been working for a decade at the intersection of education and technology. His latest creation is a new, massively-scalable ecosystem for teaching middle school students creative math problem solving, powered by a unique incentive alignment structure that involves professionally trained actors and comedians. He will also share about his journey which led to this discovery, which involved giving hundreds of talks in public parks all around the country.

For more information about the event click here.

UNM-PNM Math Contest Public Lecture

The UNM-PNM Math Contest second round exam will be held on Saturday, Feb. 8 in the afternoon at UNM. Traditionally, in the morning there is a public lecture by a renowned mathematician. This year we are very proud to host Professor Po-Shen Loh from Carnegie Mellon University.

As AI advances at shocking speed, what is the future of humanity? How should people develop skills that will still be useful in a world filled with automation? The speaker, Carnegie Mellon math professor Po-Shen Loh, traveled to 100 cities last year, speaking with (and learning from) 250 audiences on this topic, on a tour which was even covered by the Wall Street Journal.

His perspective combines insight from having served as the national coach of the USA Math Olympiad team for a decade, together with his firsthand experience inventing new solutions for large-scale real-world problems from pandemic control to problem-solving education.

In this talk, he will share his latest recommendations on how to lean into what makes us human, how to navigate the future landscape of education (including college), and how to learn how to solve unfamiliar problems. Many of his recommendations are quite different from how students and parents currently approach life. To substantiate this advice, he will also share his own story of how he used these principles to invent some of the real-world solutions mentioned above.

For more information on this event, click here.

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