Category: Uncategorized

Faculty Talk: Fun With Guarding

Speaker: Joe Mitchell Abstract: A famous problem posed by Victor Klee in the early 1970’s is the Art Gallery Problem: How many points (“guards”) are sufficient to place within a simple polygon P having n vertices so that every point of P is “seen” by at least one guard? This problem falls into a rich…Continue Reading Faculty Talk: Fun With Guarding

Activity: Why do JPEGs Look So Weird? (And other Forays into Fourier analysis)

Abstract: Out of all the image formats out there, JPEG is the most widely used in the world, and for good reason: they allow us to send and upload images at a reduced size without losing most details of an image. But how does it do this? It turns out that the JPEG algorithm is…Continue Reading Activity: Why do JPEGs Look So Weird? (And other Forays into Fourier analysis)

Faculty Talk: How to Turn the Sphere Inside-Out

Abstract: It’s really how to turn a sphere inside-out through immersions: the surface is allowed to intersect itself, but cannot form sharp folds. More precisely we want to construct a deformation between the inclusion of the unit sphere in 3-space and the antipodal embedding , such that and its first partial derivatives vary continuously with…Continue Reading Faculty Talk: How to Turn the Sphere Inside-Out

Advanced Talk: Random Thoughts on Random Sets

Abstract: Many research level problems in mathematics require lots of technical looking definitions from many advanced classes just to state, but the goal of this talk is to discuss some easy-to-state open problems about random sets in the plane. Most of these problems are probably pretty hard: several have been attacked by Fields medalists without…Continue Reading Advanced Talk: Random Thoughts on Random Sets

Student Talk: Folding a Pringle: The Secrets of the Hyperbolic Paraboloid

Abstract: There are many mathematically-interesting foods, but Pringles are quite the stand-out. Why? They are a model of a shape called a truncated hyperbolic paraboloid, which is like a hybrid of a hyperbola and a parabola, the way that a sphere is like a hybrid of two circles. But a hyperbolic paraboloid is very different…Continue Reading Student Talk: Folding a Pringle: The Secrets of the Hyperbolic Paraboloid

Student Talk: Experimental Mathematics, a computational approach to number theory’s greatest challenges

Date: March 1 Title: Experimental Mathematics, a computational approach to number theory’s greatest challenges Speaker: Romain Popescu Abstract: In this talk I will generalize the euclidean algorithm and continued fractions to PSLQ/LLL algorithm. I will give some basic definitions and explanations for what an algorithm is but we will focus more on the number theoretic…Continue Reading Student Talk: Experimental Mathematics, a computational approach to number theory’s greatest challenges

Quiz Bowl

Join us as we run a math-themed quiz bowl event! The rules of the competition will be laid out by our secretary Marc at the start, followed by a trial round. We will then proceed to three rounds of questions, each round more difficult than the last. Round 1 will feature 17 questions worth 15…Continue Reading Quiz Bowl