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Hi all,

The last meeting of the semester will take place Tuesday night at 5pm in the undergraduate lounge (room 1521? I forget the number) . We will be hanging out, playing games, etc. Come join us for pizza, and say goodbye before you go on break!

Hey all,

The last talk of the semester will be given this Wednesday from 6-7 in LGRT 1634 by Panos Kevrekidis. Come join us for pizza, soda, and math!
Abstract: We’ll touch on different aspects of discrete systems, as they arise in a variety of recent experiments pertinent to physical applications. We will start from the “traditional” spatial discreteness and how it affects elastic traveling waves in so-called acoustic or granular crystals. We will continue with a form of discreteness (or, more accurately, periodicity) in the evolution variable for pulses passing through a so-called layered optical medium and we will end with an example where the discrete number of components plays a crucial role in the dynamics of two coupled Bose-Einstein
condensates in atomic physics. In each example, we will present the relevant dynamical models and we will attempt to mesh the mathematical analysis and numerical computations with experimental results.

Hi all,

Sorry for the late notice. Math Club is cancelled tonight. (4/20)

This week (4/13) Elizabeth Drellich will give a talk, “Generating Functions: how many rabbits will Fibonacci have after 500 years?” Come join us for pizza and math from 6-7 PM in LGRT 1634!

Abstract: We are all familiar with the Fibonacci sequence, 1,1,2,3,5,8,… It has a very easy formula, each term is the sum of the two previous terms. If I asked for the 100th term in the sequence, you could figure it out in 5 minutes or so. But to find the 1000th or 100000th term might be overly time consuming. Generating functions give us a way to get a simple formula for the nth term of the sequence.

We will look at some simple recurrence relations, including the Fibonacci sequence, and find explicit formulas for their nth terms.

All you need to know about this talk is the definitions of sequences, and power series. If you a currently taking Math 132, you will be able to understand and appreciate this talk. However for all undergrads and most grad students, this should be new and exciting material.

Come join us this week for pizza and games! We have Set and Go, but feel free to bring any fun games you’d like to play. We will meet at our usual time 6-7 PM in LGRT 1634.

CORRECTION! Math Club will me at our usual time 6-7 tonight (NOT 7-9!)

Hi everyone,

Hopefully everyone had a fun and restful spring break! Math Club is back this Wednesday 3/23 from 7-9 6-7 PM in LGRT 1634. Julie Rana will give a talk “An Introduction to Surfaces: What do you get when you combine a Mobius band and a sphere?” As usual we will have pizza and soda, so come join us!

Abstract:
What’s a mathematical surface and how does it coincide with our intuition? We’ll examine some interesting properties of surfaces, how to tell if two surfaces are essentially the same, and how we can combine surfaces. Along the way, we’ll play with Mobius bands (and scissors!) and discuss a useful way to draw any surface on a piece of paper. Finally, we’ll learn about a surprising result known as the Classification of Surfaces.

Next Wednesday (3/9) 7-9PM in LGRT 101-103 is the 25th Annual Henry Jacob Mathematics Competition! The competition is open to all freshman and sophomore degree students at UMass Amherst. The problems on the exam are all drawn from elementary algebra, calculus, geometry, number theory, and combinatorics. No fancy stuff is necessary.

First prize is $1600! Sign up in LGRT 1623D by 3pm on the day of the competition (March 9). More information and sample problems can be found here: http://www.math.umass.edu/Undergrad/math_comp.html

Thanks again to Professor Turkington for an excellent discussion about modeling Jupiter’s atmosphere. I hope that many of you took away some insight into what is involved in solving a problem of this magnitude! He wanted to make his slides available to all of you in case you were interested. I’ve attached the file below. Also check out this cool video of the great red spot in motion; you can see many of the features that Prof. Turkington spoke about.

Jupiter Slides

Math Club activities will resume next semester. Have a great winter break!

-Holley and Chris

The Math Club will not meet this week (11/3) or next week (11/10). The next meeting will take place on 11/17. Stay tuned for more details. Here’s the e-mail that Holley sent out to everyone:

“This week Math Club will not officially meet. Instead there will be an event Wednesday at 5:00 PM in LGRT 1535 for math majors (or anyone) interested in teaching math at the middle and high school level. Sandra Madden from the UMass school of education will discuss what you need to do to get a job, how to learn how to teach, what courses to take, etc. “Good food” is promised. Also, next week UMass does not have a Wednesday so our next meeting will be Wednesday 11/17. See you then!”