SCMB Assistant Director Michael Lavigne is partnering with CEISMC to put on a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) Workshop on the nature of exponential growth. The workshop will run for 3 hours on Saturday 4/23 in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons.

The phrase “exponential growth” is everywhere in news and media. But what does it mean for something to grow exponentially? Spoiler: it doesn’t just mean “really fast”. Through dice games and computer simulations, we will discover how exponential growth is the natural language for describing biological populations and uncover the laws that govern this growth. We will also find that exponential processes define the spread of disease, and we will (safely) perform experiments to discover how diseases spread and, if we’re lucky, how to stop them.