Mathematics

Navajo Math Circles is a one-hour film that documents the meeting of two worlds: that of some of the country’s most accomplished mathematicians and mathematics educators, with the children and teachers in the underserved, largely rural Navajo educational system. Hundreds of Navajo children in recent years have found themselves at the center of a lively collaboration with mathematicians from around the world.

Pierre de Fermat and the Method of Infinite Descent Peter Schumer, Middlebury College Pierre de Fermat (1601 – 1665) is known as the “prince of amateurs” for his many important independent contributions to mathematics including his creation of analytic geometry, the beginnings of probability theory, and many key concepts and techniques that led to the development of calculus. We will discuss some of his imaginative number-theoretic observations and suggest how he may have discovered them. In particular, we will focus mainly on his method of infinite descent.

The Department of Mathematics presents a special lecture by Katherine Bell Krystinik, ’77 of the United States Coast Guard Academy. Professor Bell will discuss a selection of lessons imparted by Professor Emerson and how those lessons are represented in applied Coast Guard projects. Kathy was the first of Professor Emerson’s senior thesis advisees to continue on for a Ph. D. in statistics. She worked at Bell Labs and the U. S. Geological Survey before joining the faculty of the Coast Guard Academy.

Mathematics Seminar: SENIOR THESIS PRESENTATIONS I

3:00 PM – Jeremy Stratton-Smith

Homogeneous Spaces & Their Symmetries: There’s More to That Doughnut (Hole) Than You Think

 3:30   PM – Jingyi Wu

The Geometry of Spacetime: feat. Galilean Spacetime and Minkowski Spacetime using Affine Space

 4:00 PM – James Burke

Baseball as a Markov Chain: A Bayesian Approach

 All Are Welcome!

Mathematics Seminar; SENIOR THESIS PRESENTATIONS I

4:30 PM – Caroline Trowbridge

Partial Differential Equations of Pollutant Transport: The Weak Formulation

5:00   PM – Luis Echeverria

The Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem in Proving Equilibrium for Game Theory

 5:30 PM – Will Clewley

Properties and Applications of Continued Fractions

All Are Welcome!

Mathematics Seminar: SENIOR THESIS PRESENTATIONS I

3:00 PM - Andrew Bridgers

Ed isn’t so bad after all

3:30   PM - Noel Antonisse

Construction and Solvability: The Power and Beauty of Fields

 4:00 PM - Nimrod Saleh

Benford’s Leading Digit Law: from Statistical Curiosity to Proof

 4:30 PM - Kyra Gray

An Exploration of the Poisson Approximation

 All Are Welcome!

Professors Albert Y. Kim will discuss research with Professor David Allen on a statistical model of a tree’s growth as a function of current size and the competition it feels.
Prof. Allen conducted censuses in a Michigan reserve, recording the location, species, and size of all trees in both 2008 and 2014. They seek a statistical model that incorporates notions of the numbers, the sizes, the spatial density, and the species of the competitor trees

The Mathematics Departments presents Duncan Levear, ‘15 (Brandeis University) who will discuss “The Geometry of Numbers”.

Daniel Velleman (Amherst College) is our speaker. The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra says that for every nonconstant polynomial p there is a complex number z such that p(z) = 0.  In this talk he will present a method of visualizing functions on the complex plane, and use this method to illustrate why the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is true.  He will also discuss the history of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and its proofs.

The Department of Mathematics invites everyone to meet our faculty members and hear favorite short self-contained gems of elegant argument. Some highlights include: Why does the harmonic series converge? Why isn’t the square root of two a rational number? How did President Garfield prove the Pythagorean Theorem? Everyone is welcome. Pizza lunch will be available at 12:15.