There’s something fun about secret societies. The hushed passwords, arcane handshakes and blood oaths are about as good as it gets. They’re romantic in a certain way, but the main draw is probably their secrecy.
The Mallory Math Club, a math club on campus open to students who are not math majors, isn’t supposed to be a secret society, but time has a way of hiding the facts of life, and the Mallory Math Club is no exception to this.
Halie Upchurch, senior math major and president of the Mallory Math Club, didn’t really know where the club came from.
“It started sometime in 19- I don’t know,” Upchurch began, going on to say that the club started in the 20th century by someone named Mallory.
“You could ask Dr. Riggs about that,” Upchurch said, referring to the faculty sponsor of the group.
“I don’t know a lot about the history myself,” said Troy Riggs, a professor of mathematics at Union.
After this, he stood up and beckoned me to follow him through the dark U-shaped hallway of the math department.
“The first face on that wall is Mallory,” said Riggs, pointing at a board. “He was our first chair, at least as far as we remember.”
Riggs explained that there wasn’t a lot of history from the math department. People didn’t think about preserving the past; it just wasn’t important to anybody. In fact, the only real evidence Riggs knew for the history of the organization was in a single catalog from a time before most current students’ parents were born.
“We have a catalog from 1960,” said Riggs. “It lists the Mallory organization as one of the active organizations on campus.”
But we don’t really need to know the history of the club to be interested in it.
“We wanted to start the club for people who like math but aren’t typically a math major,” Upchurch said.
Outside of Kappa Mu Epsilon––the math honors society––there was nowhere for students interested in math to hang out and get to know each other.
“We have quite a few students who are interested in math, and they want to get together with other students who share similar interests,” Riggs said.
Math is one of those subjects that people either love or hate, and it can typically seem like those who love math would be math majors or minors.
“A lot of the math classes tend to focus on how God and math are related,” Upchurch said. “People outside the major may not see that, and that’s something we want to do in the future.”
Numbers are in everything. Upchurch talked about the Fibonacci sequence and how it’s present in flowers, shells and so many other things.
“Everything nature and non-nature has some sort of order to it,” said Upchurch.
She wants to show everyone else at Union that order and bring them closer to God through the process.
But what exactly happens in the Mallory Math Club? Well, there are movie nights focusing on movies that are related to math (there are a lot more than you might think), there’s a Christmas party and sometimes, they have math Jeopardy!, just in case you didn’t feel dumb enough watching regular Jeopardy! at your grandmother’s house. (Note: I actually love Jeopardy!, so this is not me mocking the show, just expressing how bad I am at math. Shout out to Alex Trebek, who is far superior to Pat Sajak in every way.)
If you are interested in math (and have taken Calc 1), then check out the club poster here:
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Those interested can attend a club meeting that takes place on the first Monday of the month at 10 a.m. in the PAC B-25 classroom.
