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 […]
Online social media networks have become extremely influential sources of news and information. Given the large audience and the ease of sharing content online, the content that spreads on online social networks can have important consequences on public opinion, policy, and voting. To better understand the online content spread, mathematical modeling of opinion dynamics is becoming […]
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 […]
In this talk, we will talk about the thin film model derived for liquid film resulting from a distributed source on a vertical wall and some distinct properties about the model. We will discuss the different behavior and properties of the model with and without considering surface tension. When the surface tension is neglected, a […]
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 […]
Statistical solutions are time-parameterized probability measures on spaces of integrable functions, which have been proposed recently as a framework for global solutions for multi-dimensional hyperbolic systems of conservation laws. We present a numerical algorithm to approximate statistical solutions of conservation laws and show that under the assumption of 'weak statistical scaling', which is inspired by […]
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 […]
In this talk, we will present a recent study of the Maxwell-Bloch equations that model the nonlinear interactions of light and matter, where the light is modeled classically by the Maxwell's equations with dispersions and the medium is modeled quantum-mechanically by the multilevel rate equations. We will show the connection between rate equations and the […]
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 […]
Join us for a social hour with applied mathematicians at Claremont Colleges and University of Utah.
