Welcome to Math Camp!

Offered at the University of Washington each September since 2014, the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS) has provided this math camp as a one-week review of mathematics and probability.

Instructor: Jess Kunke, PhD Student in Statistics

TA: Erin Lipman, PhD Student in Statistics

Intended audience:

Math camp is open to any entering or current UW graduate students and is particularly suitable for

• Social science graduate students interested in pursuing a quantitatively-oriented research career
• Social science graduate students in the early years of study in departments with CSSS tracks
• Graduate students preparing for advanced CSSS statistics courses

Objectives:

• Prepare students for CSSS and other advanced courses in statistical methodology
• Focus on conceptual foundation, basic tools, and confidence building
• Provide some introduction to programming/statistics in R

This workshop does not assume prior exposure to this material; math skills through high school algebra are helpful but can be reviewed. Part of the purpose of this workshop is that students may use lecture notes and web materials to refresh their memories of key concepts and tools as they continue in research and coursework.

Schedule

Math camp will be offered in a hybrid form this year; participants may participate in person or via Zoom. Our tentative workshop schedule is as follows:

9am-12pm, SAV 260: Review math concepts, do practice problems

1-3pm, CSSCR Big Lab (SAV 117): Introduction to programming and statistics in R

3-4pm, CSSCR Big Lab (SAV 117): Office hour if needed

Slides and materials will be linked to in the schedule below as they are made available. Much of the course material provided here was first created by Laina Mercer with developments by Jessica Godwin and Peter Gao. Jess Kunke has contributed to developing the labs since 2021.

Monday, September 12

Concepts

• Algebra
• Linear equations and systems of equations
• Functions and limits

Day 1 slides (click link to download)

Lab

• Intro to R Studio interface
• Using R as calculator
• Assigning values to variables

Day 1 lab guide (click link to download zip)

Tuesday, September 13

Concepts

• Matrices

Day 2 slides (click link to download)

Lab

• Reading in data
• Intro to data manipulation
• Working with matrices

Day 2 lab guide (click link to download zip) Day 2 lab R script (click link to download)

Wednesday, September 14

Concepts

• Derivatives
• Optimization (finding minima/maxima)

Day 3 slides (click link to download)

Lab

• Data manipulation with tidyverse
• More plotting in R!
• R Markdown

Day 3 lab materials (click link to download zip)

Thursday, September 15

Concepts

• Intro to probability (sets, basic rules, conditional probability)
• Random variables (bernoulli, binomial, uniform, normal; expectation, variance)
• Probability distributions (pmfs/pdfs)

Day 4 slides (click link to download)

Paper on relative risk vs odds ratio (click link to download)

Lab

• Practice with data and tidyverse!

Day 4 lab materials (click link to download zip)

Day 4 lab solutions (click link to download zip)

Friday, September 16

Concepts

• Integrals
• Numerical approximation to integrals
• Monte Carlo integration
• Flex time to go over anything that was confusing/could use more practice

Day 5 slides (click link to download)

Lab

• The birthday problem
• Simulating from a distribution

Day 5 lab materials (click link to download zip)