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 sculpture showcase. The artwork is illuminated by 16,000 LEDs, requiring 6500 build-hours and $50,000 in donated funds, with an interior large enough to hold 15 […]
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 between non-negativity and sums of squares has a distinguished history in mathematics starting with work of David Hilbert and Hilbert's 17th problem. I will discuss […]
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 communities of color in the United States. Racism is a known structural cause of these health inequities. Counterfactuals are essential to our understanding of causal […]
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 about factorization lengths in numerical semigroups. Surprisingly, this uses tools from complex, harmonic, and functional analysis, probability theory, algebraic combinatorics, and computer-aided design! Our results […]
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 evidence suggests that even our retinae are able to predict what we see. How? We explore some basic design principles for what causes a system […]
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 and to even gallop and bounce. The activity of the tube feet is orchestrated by a nerve net that is distributed throughout the body; there […]
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 discipline-specific groups to coordinate future course rotations.
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 […]
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 […]
