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Job Talk – Nicole Fider, UC Irvine
February 18, 2019 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Candidate for Assistant Professor in Mathematics, Scripps College
A surprising application of mathematics: How to name a color
Your brain likes patterns and categories; by grouping related ideas together, it can store and recall information quickly. Real-life continuous domains (like time and taste) are inherently composed of infinitely many points of information, which your brain segments into finitely many categories for convenience (such as morning/afternoon/evening/night, or sweet/sour/salty/bitter). This phenomenon is well-documented and is a topic of interest in the behavioral, cognitive, and social sciences.
The set of colors is another example of a continuous domain, which in English is segmented into categories called “blue,” “red,” “green,” etc. In this talk, I discuss how we apply mathematics —including calculus and linear algebra—to real-world data to study the occurrence of different categorizations schemes of the color space. I then outline several related open projects.
Monday, February 18
4:00-4:50pm
Balch 218
Scripps College
FMI contact: ctowse@scrippscollege.edu