Colloquium

Title: Unsolved Mathematics at Burning Man Abstract: Rising 12 feet tall with an 18-foot wingspan, a 2-ton unfolding dodecahedron comes to life at Burning Man, the world’s most influential large-scale […]

Title: Nonnegative Polynomials and Sums of Squares Abstract: Is x4-2x3+7x2-2x+1 nonnegative for any value of x? One way of showing that this holds is by writing x4-2x3+7x2-2x+1=1/2(x2-3x+1)2+1/2(x2+x+1)2. Studying the relationship […]

Title: Injustice, Inequity, and Inequality: Lessons at the Intersection of Mathematics, Epidemiology, and Racism Registration information for this talk at: https://www.hmc.edu/mathematics/moody-lecture-series/ Abstract:The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed existing health inequities for […]

Title: Combinatorics and the Kitchen Sink Abstract: Numerical semigroups are simple combinatorial objects that lead to deep and subtle questions. We answer in one fell swoop virtually all asymptotic questions […]

Title: Training dynamical systems to predict their input Abstract: Evolved systems seem to predict their environment. Even bacteria can implicitly predict future concentrations of scarce sugar or antibiotics, and emerging […]

Title: Sea star locomotion Abstract: The oral surface of sea stars (starfish) is lined with arrays of tube feet that enable them to achieve highly controlled locomotion on various terrains […]

Title: The Effect of Criminal Justice Decisions on Community Safety Abstract: During this talk we will, time permitting, examine several law enforcement actor's impact on community safety, including law enforcement, prosecutors and judges. To start, we examine the impact of law enforcement race and gender on use of force. We first show that conditioning on […]

Hosted by David Bachman. This is a time for us to welcome each other back from break, share any news relevant to mathematics in Claremont, and break out into smaller […]

Title: Networks in social systems Abstract: The spread of memes and misinformation on social media, political redistricting, interactions in animal populations, and the dynamics of voters during elections are among the many things that people study in the field of complex systems. All of these phenomena involve the interactions of individual parts, which come together […]

Title: No-arbitrage pricing in a market for position on a multilane freeway, with an application to lane changing Abstract: We introduce a trading mechanism allowing cars to change position in a multilane congested freeway by doing peer-to-peer transactions. For the car initiating the operation, or incoming car, the goal can be to increase speed, to […]

Title: Quantitative Investment and Modern Portfolio Theory Abstract: Investment strategies come in many flavors. Quantitative strategies incorporate or fully direct investment based on mathematical models. One of the cornerstones of […]

Title: Using Topology to Measure Shape in Data Abstract: Data of various kinds is being collected at an enormous rate, and in many different forms. Often, the data are equipped […]