Past Talks

 

Here are some talks that we've hosted in the past. Click on the title of each talk to see the poster, featuring a picture and an abstract!

December 3rd, 2018: Daoji Huang; Formal Verification in Mathematics

 

November 26th, 2018: Professor Bob Connelly; Packing and Jamming Circles in the Plane

 

November 19th, 2018: Jack Cook; A Theoretical Geometric Model for Olfactory Learning and Sensory Processing

 

November 12th, 2018: Jessie Tan; What are the Weil Conjectures?

 

November 5th, 2018: Seraphina Lee; Rational Points on Elliptic Curves

 

October 29th, 2018: Kabir Kapoor; Braid Groups

 

October 25th, 2018: Professor Gabor Domokos; The Gomboc

 

October 15th, 2018: Matt Funkhouser; Bubble Trouble

 

October 1st, 2018: Alex Black; Ring on a String

 

September 24th, 2018: Nathaniel Bannister; Turing Machines and the Halting Problem

 

September 17th, 2018: Ely Sandine; Analogs of Polynomials on the Sierpinski Gasket for a Family of Laplacians

 

September 10th, 2018: Isaac Legred; What do Cats have to do with Linear Algebra?

 

April 30th, 2018: Matt Funkhouser; Unraveling Choice from Analysis

 

April 23rd, 2018: Mikhail Molodyk; The Lotka-Volterra Model

 

April 16th, 2018: Shruthi Sridhar; Solving the Word Problem

 

April 9th, 2018: Jake Januzelli; Cryptography from the Supersingular Isogeny Problem

 

March 26th, 2018: Multiple Panelists; Impostor Syndrome Panel

 

March 19th, 2018: Linus Setiabrata; The Necklace-Splitting and the Inscribed Square Problem

 

March 12th, 2018: Louise Lee; The QR Algorithm

 

March 5th, 2018: Philip Sink; Frege's Philosophy of Logic

 

February 12th, 2018: Jason Snyder; The Kakeya Needle Problem

 

February 5th, 2018: Connor Simpson; The Stanley-Reisner Correspondence

 

November 20th, 2017: Seraphina Lee; Spectral Decimation for Families of Laplacians on the Sierpinski Gasket

 

November 13th, 2017: Mahrud Sayrafi; Computations over Local Rings in Macaulay2

For more information, check out Mahrud's thesis, as well as some source code and examples.

 

November 6th, 2017: Misha Molodyk; Mono-Monostatic Bodies and Where to Find Them

For more information on what was discussed in the talk, check out the following 3 articles: Static equilibria of planar, rigid bodies: is there anything new? by G.Domokos, J.Papadopulos, and A.Ruina; Static Equilibria of Rigid Bodies: Dice, Pebbles, and the Poincare-Hopf Theorem by P.L.Varkonyi and G.Domokos; and Mono-monostatic Bodies: The Answer to Arnold's Question by P.L.Varkonyi and G.Domokos.

 

October 30th, 2017: Roberto Romeu; Monstrous Moonshine & How to Make Sense of Wikipedia Math Articles

 

October 16th, 2017: Kabir Kapoor; On Self-Intersection and Rotation of Plane Curves

 

October 2nd, 2017: Alexander Black, Shuli Chen, Linus Setiabrata, Samuel Saloff-Coste, Caleb Koch, Jason Snyder, Oliver Wang, Zoe Wellner; Math Undergrad Research Symposium

 

September 25th, 2017: Professor Justin Moore; Richard Thompson's group \(F\)

 

September 18th, 2017: Anna Brosowsky; An Introduction to Gröbner Bases

 

September 11th, 2017: Jiazhen Tan; Fun Facts about Power Sets

 

August 28th, 2017: Zoe Wellner; An Introduction to Topological Data Analysis

 

May 1st, 2017: Connor Simpson; Catalan Numbers

 

April 24th, 2017: Shruthi Sridhar; How can we tell if two knots are not the same?

 

April 17th, 2017: Professor Brian Hwang; Why we'll never be able to solve general polynomial equations and what we can do about it

 

April 10th, 2017: Anna Brosowsky; Graphs and Probability

 

March 27th, 2017: Jason Snyder; The Banach-Tarski Paradox

 

March 20th, 2017: Jake Januzelli; How Busy is the Busiest Beaver?

 

March 13th, 2017: Katie Borg; On the Unique Solvability of a Grid-Based Puzzle

 

March 6th, 2017: Aryeh Zax; Calculating \(\zeta(2n)\) with Quantum Mechanics

Here are notes from the talk.

 

February 27th, 2017: Professor Daniel Rubin; Hidden Symmetry in the Roots of Polynomials

To see more of this type of development, check out the book Introduction to the Theory of Algebraic Equations by L.E. Dickson.

 

February 13th, 2017: Matthew Funkhouser; Escape to Hyperspace

 

November 28th, 2016: Christopher Strohmeier; A Bridge Between Words: The Hilbert Transform

 

November 21st, 2016: Oliver Wang; \(\delta\)-Hyperbolic Metric Spaces

 

November 7th, 2016: Ravi Ramakrishna '88; Elliptic Curves: What are they and why should we care about them?

 

October 31st, 2016: Matthew Funkhouser; To the Point at Infinity and Beyond!

 

October 17th, 2016: Vivian Kuperberg; On Defeating Hydras

 

October 3rd, 2016: Aryeh Zax; Summing Divergent Series

 

September 26th, 2016: Zoe Wellner; On Eating Cake and Keeping Friends

 

September 19th, 2016: Professor Florian Frick; On Intersections of Sets

 

September 12th, 2016: Panel Discussion on Impostor Syndrome in Mathematics

Here are the articles that were referenced during the panel: On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, Mathematical Education, and the foreward to The Best Writing on Mathematics of 2010, all by William Thurston. There is also The Mathematics of Three-dimensional Manifolds by William Thurston and Jeffrey R. Weeks.

 

May 6th, 2016: Alex Frederick; An introduction to \(L\)-functions

 

May 2nd, 2016: Professor Karola Meszaros; Ehrhart Polynomials of Integer Polytopes

 

April 18th, 2016: Ian Montague; Geometric Group Theory

 

April 15th, 2016: Professor Scott Chapman, Sam Houston State University; A Tale of Two Monoids: A Friendly Introduction to the Theory of Non-Unique Factorizations

For further reading, check out Professor Chapman's website to find slides from the presentation as well as related papers on this topic.

 

April 11th, 2016: Rediet Abebe; Laplacian Eigenvalues of Simplicial Complexes

 

April 4th, 2016: Oliver Wang; Relative Group Cohomology

For further reading, check out the book Cohomology of Groups by Kenneth Brown and the paper Relative Homology and Poincaré Duality for Group Pairs by Robert Bieri and Beno Eckmann.

 

March 21st, 2016: Professor Lionel Levine; How to Make the Most of a Shared Meal: Plan the Last Bite First

 

February 29th, 2016: Sujit Rao; How To Multiply

 

February 22nd, 2016: Max Hallgren; Curvature, Topolology, and Pinched Spheres

 

February 8th, 2016: Alex Frederick; Deformations of Associative Algebras

 

November 30th, 2015: Aryeh Zax; When is the multiplicative group modulo n cyclic?

Here are notes from the talk.

 

November 16th, 2015: Vivian Kuperberg; Fun Facts About Free Groups

 

November 9th, 2015: Professor William Dunham; Two More Morsels from Euler

 

November 2nd, 2015: Professor Allen Knutson; Symmetric and Less-Symmetric Polynomials