Bard Mathematician Lauren Rose Gives Talk at Hope College about Her Card Game, Quads

The Mathematics and Statistics Department at Hope College invited Bard Associate Professor of Mathematics Lauren Rose to give an interactive discussion to faculty and students about the card game Quads, which she invented with Jeffrey Pereira ’13, who helped design Quads as part of his Senior Project. During her talk “Quads: A SET-like Game with a Twist,” Rose explained the rules of the game—players try to create as many quad groupings as they can, given several conditions—and participants had a chance to try their hand at it. “SET is a popular card game that you can teach a five-year-old (because you don’t need to be able to read) but there’s a ton of math in it,” said Rose. “SET contains three cards … so we asked, ‘What if we did four cards?’” Although the rules are straightforward, the game and its variations apply mathematical concepts including combinatorics, probability, geometry, and algebra. Rose and other mathematicians continue to study the underlying layers of math and logic that drive the game play. The paper, “How Many Cards Should You Lay Out in a Game of EvenQuads,” coauthored by Tim Goldberg ’02, Raphael Walker ’21, Julia Crager ’23, Felicia Flores ’23, Darrion Thornburgh ’24, and Daniel Rose Levine ’24, was recently published the journal La Matematica. The cards in the official Quads game, published as EvenQuads by the Association for Women in Math, feature images and biographies of female mathematicians on one side, which Rose hopes will encourage women to consider entering the traditionally male-dominated field of mathematics.

Post Date: 04-03-2024