Mathematics

A triangle has six “parts,” three sides and three angles. If you know five parts, do you know the triangle?”

Presented by Bruce Peterson, Professor Emeritus of Middlebury College.
Refreshments will be provided.

Evaluating the impact of an athlete’s performance on a team, deciding on a treatment plan for a cancer patient and evaluating how to encourage people to manage their weight are all interesting and carefully studied problems. In these examples and many others, decision makers often ultimately rely on scoring systems that reduce high dimensional data to a single value. We present the ways that scoring systems are similar across many applications, how they provide insights, how they can lead to difficulties and how they can be evaluated and improved.

Heather Zinn-Brooks, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, will present a talk titled “The Mathematics of Opinion Dynamics.” Talk description: Given the large audience and the ease of sharing content, the shifts in opinion driven by online interaction have important implications for interpersonal interactions, public opinion, voting, and policy. There is a critical and growing demand to understand the mechanisms behind the spread of content online.

A talk by Professor Peter Schumer, in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Light refreshments will be provided. Talk description: Logic conundrums and brain teasers are nearly as old as mathematics itself. Some classic math puzzles involve liars and truth tellers, scales with a limited number of weighings, vessels holding various amounts of liquid, and river crossings with jealous spouses. In this talk we’ll discuss several variations on some colored hat puzzles plus a probabilistic problem involving numbered lockers. All are welcome to join us!

Join us for a talk by Sabina Haque, PhD Candidate at Harvard University, and Middlebury Class of 2018. Sabina’s talk is titled “A graph-theoretic approach to Markov processes with applications in biochemical reaction networks.” Talk description: The linear framework models biochemical reaction networks under timescale separation using finite directed graphs with labeled edges. Recently, the linear framework has provided a deterministic approach to understanding the thermodynamic properties of biological information processing systems.

To effectively forage in natural environments, organisms must learn and adapt to changes in the availability of resources. Patch exploitation is a canonical foraging behavior, and the way in which animals account for environmental change and uncertainty should be captured more accurately by mathematical models. We first address this issue in a model describing agents that statistically and sequentially infer patch resource quality using Bayesian updating, based on their resource encounter history.

Please join us for a Women in Data Science conference where speakers from both within and outside Middlebury discuss their experiences and engagement with the field of data science. This event will include presentations by academic and industry professionals, as well as a faculty panel featuring Professor Myers (Economics department) and Professor Abe (Japanese department). Snacks will be provided!

A talk by Peter Schumer, Department of Mathematics, Middlebury College.

Presentation by T. Christine Stevens Professor Emerita, Saint Louis University, Associate Executive Director of American Mathematical Society Operatic bass Jerome Hines, who died in 2003, sang at the New York Metropolitan Opera for over forty years. He was also a math major who retained a lifelong interest in mathematics. In the 1950’s he published several papers based on work that he had done as a student. Our speaker will focus on the first of these papers, which describes a new method for finding the solutions of an equation.

Professor Peter Schumer will present a mathematics seminar talk on “The Bernoulli Family and Some of their Mathematical Creations.” The Swiss Bernoulli family included at least eight prominent mathematicians and scientists. He will discuss a bit of their family history - especially brothers Jakob (1654 - 1705) and Johann (1667 - 1748) and Johann’s son Daniel (1700 - 1782). He will then give a brief overview of some of their interesting mathematics such as the brachistochrone problem (curve of quickest descent) and the gambling problem known as the St. Petersburg Paradox.