Author: A Havens

Robin will talk tonight in LGRT 1528, 5-6pm about knots and links. Here’s his abstract:

I will introduce the mathematical study of knots, links, and the Gauss linking number. The talk will involve pictures, some brief history, and an elementary formula in terms of counting crossings. At the end, I will reinterpret this formula in terms of multivariable calculus.

Hope to see you there! Pizza and soda will be provided.

The math club meets again this Wednesday, 4/6, from 5-6pm in LGRT 1528. Come have pizza and hear graduate student Mark Lowell discuss the Fermi paradox and his use of mathematical modeling to explain it. Here’s an abstract:

A Metapopulation Model of Interstellar Colonization

This Wednesday, Mark Lowell will solve the Fermi Paradox – don’t miss it! By adapting and modifying the Levins metapopulation model from mathematical ecology to modeling interstellar colonization, he will show how we can explain the absence of aliens in our solar system. If time permits, he will also discuss the use of subgradient optimization methods to solving very-high-dimensional quadratic equations.

Join us for Jason McGibbon’s long awaited Go talk! 5-6pm in LGRT 1528, today, Wednesday, 3/30! Pizza and soda and knowledge of the effect of modernity on an ancient game await! Have an abstract:

Go in the time of Google

We’ll talk about some of the underlying theory behind the DeepMind’s AlphaGo, an AI which recently beat Lee Sedol 4 games to 1 in the venerable game of go (also known as weiqi or baduk). Along the way we’ll discuss neural networks, Monte Carlo tree searches, and some of the basics of this (at least) 2,500 year old game.

Tonight at 5pm in LGRT 1528, I’ll tell you about homology. Not all about it. A bit like a “Homology for anybody” talk, in the spirit of UMass math program alum Dan Briggs. Come get pizza, and learn about one of the fundamental constructions within modern mathematics. Here’s an abstract:

When studying classification problems, mathematicians need invariants. Originating in algebraic topology, homology is an invariant that involves associating sequences of Abelian groups to mathematical objects. In the last 120 years, it has become an indispensable tool in several areas of mathematics. We’ll discuss simplicial homology for a few example spaces, showing how it is computable from triangulations. We’ll also discuss how integral simplicial homology of a surface connects to the classical invariant called the Euler characteristic. We’ll then conclude by discussing what is meant by “a homology theory”.

Tonight from 5-6pm in LGRT 1528 we’ll be watching some math videos, enjoying some pizza, and perhaps squeezing in some games, like Set, or Sprouts. Come join us!

This week in math club graduate student Isabelle Beaudry will discuss inference with social network data with applications in public health. We meet 5 – 6pm Wednesday, February 24th in LGRT 1528. Pizza and soda will be provided.

Isabelle’s abstract
Estimating disease prevalence among human populations is crucial for public health surveillance. In some settings however, we don’t have a list of individuals in the population of interest. In this talk, I will discuss a sampling technique which alleviates this problem by using social networks. I will therefore introduce some mathematical representation of social networks, follow with a description of Markov chains on the network nodes and finish with a brief introduction to prevalence estimation.

The UMass undergraduate Math Club will meet this Wednesday, 2/3, 5-6pm in LGRT 1528. This week our own club co-organizer and pizza wrangler Dan Nichols will tell us about… groups!

Dan Nichols will give a quick tour of the area of mathematics known as group theory, focusing on geometric and combinatorial perspectives and on applications outside pure mathematics. The talk will be quite accessible to calculus students, but it should also be relevant even to those who have already taken an abstract algebra class.

We’ll have the pizza. And also the math. So we hope to see you there!

Join us tonight for the return of Richard Buckman and his perplexing puzzles (that he scrapes off of the internet). We’ll hang out, eat pizza, imbibe soda, and work on puzzles, from 5-6 pm in LGRT 1528. Unwind from all that math! Or bug Rich, Dan, and Andrew about interesting math, while we struggle to complete logic puzzles like cave, slitherlink, statue park, the Riemann hypothesis, and the smooth Poincaré conjecture in dimension 4. Maybe not those last two, tonight…

The UMass undergraduate Math Club will meet this Wednesday, 2/3, 5-6pm in LGRT 1528. This week, UMass grad student Mark Lowell will discuss basic techniques for modeling populations of wild animals using ordinary differential equations, including exponential and logistic models, the Lotka-Volterra equations, the May-Leonard equations, and cellular automata.

As usual, we’ll bring the pizza and soda if you bring yourselves and your nerdgoggles enthusiasm.

The UMass undergraduate Math Club will meet this Wednesday, 1/27, 5-6pm in LGRT 1634. This week, UMass grad student Andrew Havens will describe a pair of pencil and paper 2 player games, which will be a proxy for learning a little combinatorial game theory and topology. Participation is encouraged, as we will play the games to uncover their secrets. This meeting will be accessible to students of any level, and presumes no familiarity with either topology or game theory.

Pizza and soda will be provided!