January 2026 Newsletter

Welcome to the Math and AI 4 Girls January newsletter! This month, we’re excited to share inspiring stories of women in STEM, fascinating breakthroughs in math and AI research, and important contest updates as we count down to the upcoming MA4G competition!

Contributors: Fiona Liu, Angelina Wang, Rory Hu, Chelsea Lu, Advika Asthana, Evelyn Qiao

Table of Contents

1. About Us

2. MA4G Competition Update

3. Problem of the Month

4. New: Puzzle!

5. Women in Math Story

6. Math and AI Research

7. Promotional

8. POTM Resources & Hints

About Us

Math and AI 4 Girls is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting young girls' interest in STEM. Each spring, we organize a competition designed to motivate students to engage with problem-solving through a challenging problem set and share their unique STEM stories through two thought-provoking essay prompts.

Any female students with U.S. residency younger than 15 years old are eligible to enter! (Past grand prize winners, however, are not eligible to re-enter.) Winners are recognized at an online awards ceremony during the summer, and award recipients will receive prizes, such as up to 1,000 dollars, merchandise from sponsors, a personalized award certificate, and more! If you know anyone who might be interested, please encourage them to stay connected via our website and join our Discord, where we offer more math competition opportunities, host activities such as problem-of-the-week, and prepare for next year’s competition, opening in March 2026!

MA4G Competition Update

We’re thrilled to announce a huge update! The lower age limit of the competition has now been removed. This means that ANY girl in 8th grade or below is now eligible to participate in the competition! 

Be sure to spread the word to any younger classmates, family members, or friends! We can’t wait to see your amazing submissions.

We are now just TWO months away from the MA4G competition! As a reminder, the competition will open in mid-March, and you’ll have a chance to win prizes of up to $1000 as well as merch from our sponsors.

In the meantime, the problem set team is releasing weekly challenges in our Discord server, along with a Problem of the Month—which you can find below! You can find all the details on our website. We will award $10 for the eligible contestant with the highest cumulative POTW score for each month and $50 for the eligible contestant with the highest cumulative POTM score at the end of the season. Everyone is encouraged to participate!

If you are too young to make a Discord account, it is perfectly fine for your parents or guardians to make an account and join our server for you. If you win a prize at the end of the season, however, we will contact you to verify your information.

As we get closer to March, the team is extremely excited for you to see the competition! Stay tuned for upcoming updates, stay involved, and help us spread the word to your communities! You can find us on AoPS, Instagram, Discord, and our website.

POTM

Welcome to MA4G’s first Problem of the Month of 2026! Every issue of the newsletter, we’ll feature a math challenge for you to try. This month’s problem is below:

Beary the bear is trying to catch her brunch, invisible salmon! She wakes up every day at a random time between 7:30 and 8:00 AM and takes 15 minutes to reach the river. She waits at the river for 20 minutes. If no salmon appear, she leaves, but 10 minutes later she will regret her decision and return to wait for 15 more minutes. If still no fish appear, then she will go back to her den and instead will eat mushrooms. The salmon at the river come at a random time between 7:55 and 8:30 AM, and if they don’t see Beary, they will be visible for 5 minutes. Otherwise, they will stay invisible and leave immediately. What is the probability that Beary eats mushrooms for brunch on a given day?

Problem Credits: Ella Zheng, MA4G '26

Submit your solutions here!

If you’re feeling stuck, we have resources and hints at the bottom of this newsletter to help you out. We highly recommend trying your best before checking the hints, and working with them one at a time.

Everyone is encouraged to participate, and we will be giving $50 at the end of the season to the eligible contestant with the highest cumulative POTM score! 

Good luck and have fun!

New: Puzzle!

This month, we’ve added a new section featuring puzzles designed to challenge you and get your brain thinking!

The puzzle for January 2026 is called “Trees and Tents.” Here are the rules:

1. Pair each tree with a tent that is adjacent to it either horizontally or vertically (not diagonally). Every tree only corresponds to one tent and vice versa.

2. The numbers outside the grid correspond to how many tents are in each row/column.

3. Tents must never touch each other, not even diagonally.

Here are three levels for you to try. Answers will be revealed in the next edition of the newsletter!

Level 1: Easy

Level 2: Medium

Level 3: Hard

Problem Credits: Chelsea Lu, MA4G '26

Women in Math Story

Every month, the MA4G newsletter shares a story about a figure who reflects the mission of MA4G. This month, we share the journey of Ada Lovelace, whose passion and dedication both shattered historical barriers for women and allowed her to become the first computer programmer.

Lovelace was born in London on December 10, 1815, to educational reformer Anne Isabelle Milbanke and renowned poet Lord Byron. Lovelace’s mother feared she would follow in the footsteps of her father, who was known to be erratic and unpredictable, so she pushed Lovelace toward science and mathematics, something unusual for women at the time. Lovelace spent her childhood filled with curiosity and passion about the sciences, and a temporary paralysis due to a bout of measles allowed her to focus even more on her studies. As she grew older, she concentrated on mathematics, studying advanced calculus and the Bernoulli numbers.

At seventeen, Lovelace became friends with mathematician Charles Babbage and was introduced to his proposed  “Analytical Engine,” a mechanical computer that could solve complex problems. Due to her strong grasp of the Engine’s technical design and capabilities, Lovelace was asked to translate a French article about the engine into English. While Babbage only saw the engine as a tool for complex calculations, Lovelace saw far greater potential. Her translation tripled the article’s length as she added original notes, calculations, and innovations that were later heralded as the first comment on what is now computer programming. Most famously, she added Note G, a computer algorithm used to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This was the first algorithm written for a computer, making Ada Lovelace the first computer programmer.

Despite Ada Lovelace’s early passing from cervical cancer in 1852, at the age of 36, her legacy lives on. A century later, codebreaker Alan Turing would use her notes to conceptualize the first computer, and the US Department of Defense named the widely used coding language Ada after her. Today, Ada Lovelace is remembered for her enduring legacy, invaluable contributions to computer science, and pioneering role as a woman in STEM. 

Math and AI Research

As we move into 2026, research in the fields of mathematics and artificial intelligence has continued to reveal new and exciting breakthroughs! We’ll be breaking down some of the most interesting topics. Click on any link to learn more! 

I. Predicting the weather with AI and physics

Researchers from the UChicago Data Science Institute’s AI for Climate (AICE) Research Initiative, including Y. Qiang Sun, Pedram Hassanzadeh, and Tiffany Shaw, are forecasting extreme weather events with AI. Specifically, they’re trying to predict “gray swan” weather occurrences, which are rare but have catastrophic impacts. These events may only occur once in a millennium, but weather forecasting AI models are typically trained on a mere 40 to 50 years of historical climate data. So how can AI models be extrapolated to gray swan extremes?

Here’s how it works:

1. The researchers trained five versions of FourCastNet, a transformer-based deep neural network, but it failed to predict Category 5 tropical cyclones after training on only Category 1 and 2 storm data.

2. They decided to use physical laws, such as gradient-wind balance, to impose constraints on their model.

3. Broadly, the researchers explored the problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in statistics.

Although the AICE researchers are still in the early stages of combining AI with physics-based climate models, their initial tests achieved the same accuracy as traditional approaches in a faster time. Their work is just one example of how AI models can be grounded by a foundation of known mathematical and physical properties to increase prediction accuracy. 

II. A shape that can't pass through itself

In the late 17th century, a royal wager gave rise to a problem that would intrigue by mathematicians for over 300 years. Prince Rupert of the Rhine bet that a hole could be cut through a cube large enough to let another cube of the same size pass through it. English mathematician John Wallis showed this property to be true: when a cube is tilted along its diagonal, it casts a hexagonal shadow larger than the square cross-section of the other cube, so the latter can indeed pass through! Mathematicians coined the “Rupert property,” or the property that a shape can pass through an identical copy of itself, in honor of Prince Rupert’s bet.

For centuries, mathematicians believed that all convex polyhedra, or shapes with flat sides, straight edges, and no indentations, have the Rupert property. But Jakob Steininger and Sergey Yurkevich have discovered the Noperthedron (named for a combination of “Rupert” and “nope”), which has 90 vertices, 152 faces… and does not have the Rupert property.

The Noperthedron. Image credit: http://www.mapleprimes.com/art/42-The-Noperthedron

Steininger and Yurkevich generated the noperthedron with a computer algorithm based on their criteria for Nopert candidates, or shapes that do not have the Rupert property. They revealed that there was in fact a way for Prince Rupert to have lost the bet—only three centuries too late.

III. AI in robotics: the advancements of 2025

This past year, we’ve seen groundbreaking advancements in physical AI, or artificial intelligence that helps machines perceive and interact with the world. Traditional robots are preprogrammed with specific instructions, but physical AI helps them learn from their experiences and adapt in real time. 

Here are some recent breakthroughs:

• Visual language action (VLA) models: VLA models use computer vision and natural language processing to inform their motor control.

• Combining learning approaches: By combining reinforcement learning (behavior developed through trial and error) and imitation learning (behavior developed through mimicking a specific demonstration), robots accelerate improvement.

• Humanoid robots: Chain of thought reasoning and agentic AI systems are creating the backbone for the “brains” of humanoid robots.

In the novel and fast-paced world of AI and math, hundreds of updates roll in every month. Reading our bite-sized reports can help you stay up to date with the current developments in this realm!

Promotional

Every month, we try to spotlight at least one organization that shares our mission of supporting girls in STEM. This month, we’re featuring CodeHER Competition, an international informatics competition for girls worldwide. CodeHER is a free, original programming contest for pre-college students who want to explore competitive programming and strengthen their problem-solving skills. No prior experience is required. If you’re interested, sign up here by February 25th!  

Thank you very much to our current and past sponsors: Jane Street, DE Shaw & Co, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hudson River Trading, AI4All, Automation Anywhere, and J.P. Morgan Chase. If you’re interested in sponsoring us, please reach out!

POTM Resources & Hints

1. Write the times that Beary will get to the river in terms of the time that she wakes up.

2. Try to think geometrically and compare Beary's time with the salmon's time. Here is a helpful AoPS article: https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php?title=Geometric_probability.

3. What are the conditions that Beary eats mushrooms?