NOTE: This post was originally published at princetonalumniweekly.blogspot.com/
On the scene
Jordan in concert: Jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan '81 performs Sept. 30 in Richardson Auditorium. Jordan's concert was the concluding event of "Coming Back and Looking Forward," a University conference for black Princeton alumni.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Soccer rivals, baseball history
Princeton women’s soccer renews its rivalry with Rutgers in Piscataway, N.J., Oct. 4 at 8 p.m. The game will be broadcast live on Fox Soccer Channel. Princeton, led by Diana Matheson ’08, has started the season 4-4-1. After one-goal losses to Yale Sept. 23 and Dartmouth Sept. 30, the Tigers are anxious to return to their winning ways, but the Scarlet Knights, 9-1-1 this season, are off to their best start in program history.
On Oct. 7, alumnus Chris Young ’02 likely will become the first Princetonian to play in Major League Baseball’s postseason. The 6-foot-10-inch righthander is slated to be the starting pitcher for the San Diego Padres in game three of their National League playoff series with the St. Louis Cardinals (4 p.m. on ESPN).
Tiger tunes: New music from alumni artists
Emily Tepe ’00 recently released her first CD, IVA. Tepe, who signed with a small production and management company, Vurse, describes her music as “electric-organic-operatic-pop.” Last year she moved to Sweden on a Fulbright Scholarship for performing artists and had been training as a classical opera singer before shifting to her new sound. Click here to buy or listen to her music.
Game, Set, math
Sophomore Aaron Potechin was introduced to the card game Set a year and a half ago by a friend at Columbia who was writing his senior thesis about the game’s mathematics. Set uses a deck of 81 unique cards with four attributes –- color, shading, shape, and number –- and players try to group related sets of three. (For a complete explanation and a demonstration, visit the game’s Web site.)Potechin was immediately hooked, both to playing the game and deciphering its underlying probabilities. He answered questions such as the average number of sets in a group of 12 cards (2.7) and the maximum number of cards one can deal without having a related set (20). From there he moved on to affine geometry, envisioning the game in a series of vectors. On Sept. 29, he presented his findings, which he hopes to publish, in front of about 30 colleagues in Princeton’s math club.
Understanding the math behind Set does not make Potechin a better player, he said, but it does help him to appreciate the “elegance” of the game. Said Potechin, who is also an avid bridge player: “The probabilities in bridge? I’m not sure there’s much to say about them. With Set, there’s some pretty cool math.”