Author: twilson

Since this Wednesday is a Monday, we won’t be having a seminar this week. We also won’t be meeting on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

After the break, we have two great talks lined up on applied math, so watch this space for abstracts and titles.

Please join us for the Undergraduate Math Seminar on Wednesday, 5:30-6:30 in LGRT 1634. This week, Alden Gassert
will give an untitled talk on Pascal’s Triangle and other nice topics
(abstract below). As always, pizza and soda will be provided.

Abstract:

At some point in our lives, we have all asked, “what is research in
mathematics?” I hope to provide a glimpse of what it is like to do
research mathematics by sharing my recent work. In the first part of
this talk, we will look at many of the well-known relations within
Pascal’s famous triangle. In the second part, I will share my resent
research experiences in which my problem led me to find some obscure
relations between elements of Pascal’s Triangle.

Please join us for the Undergraduate Math Seminar, which meets at its usual time and place this week- Wednesday, 5:30-6:30 in LGRT 1634. Elizabeth Drellich will deliver a Halloween themed talk entitled “The Zombies are Generating!” (abstract below). As always, pizza and soda
will be provided.

See you there!

Abstract:

If on Halloween there is one zombie, who infects 3 people on Nov.1,
and then each zombie infects 3 new people a day, every day, we will
see that it is straight forward to calculate that there will be 4^n
zombies walking around on the nth day after Halloween. That is a lot
of zombies. But what if the zombie virus only allowed a newly created
zombie to lurch around for 2 days? Or what if each zombie infects 3
people its first day, but only one its second day before it decomposes
and is unable to hunt for more brains? We will learn about generating
functions as a way to determine how many zombies are out to get us.
Some parts of this talk will assume that you have seen sequences and
series, but it is aimed at anyone who prefers eating pizza to human
brains.

Hi everyone,

This week, Nico Aiello will be speaking on: “Why vote? The only reasonable voting system is a dictatorship” (abstract below). As always, pizza and soda will be provided. We’ll also be back in our usual room, LGRT1634 from 5:30-6:30

Abstract:

In honor of election season, we will discuss voting theory and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. It is not difficult to convince yourself that if we were to design a voting system, we would want the following two fairness criteria to be satisfied: 1) if every voter prefers X over Y, then society prefers X over Y and 2) if every voter’s preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then society’s preference between X and Y also remains unchanged. And yet, in his 1949 PhD thesis, Kenneth Arrow proved that if there are more than two choices in an election, the only rank-order voting system that satisfies both of the above conditions is a dictatorship. We will prove this somewhat troubling theorem and discuss what “fixes” can be made to our voting system to sidestep Arrow’s negative conclusion. This talk assumes no mathematical background and will therefore be very accessible to everyone.

This week, I’ll be speaking on the History of Functions (subtitled, regretfully, Putting the Fun in Functions)- an abstract appears below.

Note that for this week only, we will be meeting in LGRT 1530. We’ll have pizza and drinks as usual.

Abstract:
Although functions are fundamental mathematical objects, they weren’t actually defined until 1673, by Leibniz. Since that time, the definition has evolved in a variety of directions- occasionally false, as when Fourier defined functions to be anything with a Fourier series. In this talk, we’ll trace the development of the definition through history and then discuss extending the notion of a function to a variety of branches of modern mathematics. This talk will be very accessible and (hopefully) entertaining.

Join us on Wednesday, 10/10 at 5:30 pm in LGRT 1634 for pizza and a talk on Bayesian Statistics by Michael Lavine.

 

Abstract:
I will use a single example, cancer rates at an elementary school, to explain (1), the Likelihood Principle, (2) Bayesian statistics, and (3) why classical statistics cannot be used to compare hypotheses.

There won’t be an Undergrad Math Seminar this week because we thought many of you would want to go to the Actuary Career Fair, which is happening at our usual time. Check it out if you’re interested, and we’ll start up again next week with a talk on statistics by Michael Lavine.

 

 

 

Our first speaker of the semester will be Sam Lind, who will speak on Godel’s Theorem (abstract below). Join us on Wednesday, 9/26 at 5:30 in LGRT 1634 for pizza, soda, and some great math!

 

Godel’s Theorems: A Look At One of the Most Mindblowing Results of the
20th Century

Have you ever wondered if physics could come up with a “theory of
everything”? Of perhaps you have wondered whether in the future we
will devise computer security which is 100% un-hackable. Probably you
have also wondered whether there is a difference between the material
of your body and your self or your mind. As it turns out, a legendary
result from formal logic bears upon all three of three of these
seemingly disparate questions. In 1931 the logician Kurt Godel proved
two astonishing theorems, which effectively asserted that: 1. There
are true statements which (a form of) mathematics will never be able
to prove and 2. We can never prove with 100% certainty that our
mathematics is consistent, i.e. free of contradictions. This talk will
discuss some of the background to these questions, will explain the
ideas behind Godel’s proof, and elaborate on these theorems’
connections to other deep questions in fields like mathematics,
computer science, and philosophy. No significant math background is
required!