Streaming Now
Bird by Bird
“It’s a hard time to be in government, but that’s what makes it more important.” — Carolyn Yocom MBA ’88, director of health care at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, who visited the Atkinson Graduate School of Management in September as part of its Executive in Residence program.
In honor of Willamette’s anniversary, Professor of Biology David Craig will complete 175 walks around campus to count birds by the end of this year.
Often accompanied by students, faculty members and members
of the Bird Nerds student club, he tracks and records what he sees in the eBird app, a global database of bird records. Every new entry helps birders better predict the location of species, including the 92 located here on campus. During one morning walk, Craig identified 22 species ranging from a red-breasted nuthatch to a Cooper’s hawk.
Though Willamette is a small campus with a modest bird habitat,
the high-frequency of observations by the community has made it a hotspot on the app. Craig says it’s now “a location that many birders can use.”
Project Mixes Art and Algorithms
12
FALL 2017
In an interdisciplinary project this summer, Willamette art and math students found common ground — and inspiration. Supported by the university’s Liberal Arts Research Collaborative grant, they joined forces to produce math-based art for an exhibit called “Creating Problems.”
One studio art major drew an array of pentagons across 16 sheets of paper and created an algorithm to determine the color scheme. A math student used graph theory to devise an elaborate and visually stunning Ferris wheel-like shape of circles and points connected by hundreds of lines. Initially wary of the other discipline, the students found surprising similarities. Both fields provide rules or theories to help develop ideas for projects or proofs. Mathematicians and artists also take risks during their respective processes and accept failure as integral to the effort.