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Community structure in networks: the effect of communities on a preferential attachment model and epidemic spreading (Emily Fischer, Cornell)

Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

Online social networks and other networks of interest are known to exhibit community structure, where a community is defined to be a highly interconnected group of nodes with possibly shared traits or features. However, classic network models, such as the preferential attachment model, do not account for community structure. In this talk, I will present […]

Subgraph statistics (Benny Sudakov, ETH Zurich)

Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

Given integers $k,l$  and a graph $G$, how large can be the fraction of $k$-vertex subsets of $G$ which span exactly $l$ edges?  The systematic study of this very natural  question  was recently initiated by Alon, Hefetz, Krivelevich and Tyomkyn who also proposed several interesting conjectures on this topic. In this talk we discuss a theorem […]

Cracking the Code: Predicting Properties of Material Fracture Networks using Machine Learning (Allon Percus, CGU)

Shanahan B460, Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA, United States

Understanding how fluid flows through heterogeneous materials, and how it can make these materials fail, are among the hardest challenges in materials science.  Experiments and simulations show that flow through subsurface rock is mostly limited to a small subnetwork, or backbone, of fractures.  Identifying this backbone would allow for a large speedup in flow and […]

Job Talk – Nicole Fider, UC Irvine

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 […]

Knowledge, strategies, and know-how (Pavel Naumov, CMC)

Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

An agent comes to a fork in a road. There is a sign that says that one of the two roads leads to prosperity and another to death. The agent must take the fork, but she does not know which road leads where. Does the agent have a strategy to get to prosperity? On one […]

Personal Perspectives on m-ary Partitions (James Sellers, Penn State)

Shanahan B460, Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA, United States

Abstract:  A great deal of my research journey has involved the study of m-ary partitions.  These are integer partitions wherein each part must be a power of a fixed integer m > 1.  Beginning in the late 1960s, numerous mathematicians (including Churchhouse, Andrews, Gupta, and Rodseth) studied divisibility properties of m-ary partitions.  In this talk, I will discuss work I completed […]

A nonorientable version of the Milnor Conjecture (Cornelia A. Van Cott, USF)

Roberts North 104, CMC 320 E. 9th St., Claremont, CA, United States

In 1968, Milnor famously conjectured that the smooth 4-genus of the torus knot T(p,q) is given by (p-1)(q-1)/2. This conjecture was first verified by Kronheimer and Mrowka in 1993 and has received several other proofs since then. In this talk, we discuss a nonorientable analogue of this conjecture, first formulated by Josh Batson. We prove […]

Uniform Convergence: A One-Woman Play

Millikan 1051, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

Uniform Convergence is a one-woman play, written and performed by mathematics graduate student Corrine Yap. It juxtaposes the stories of two women trying to find their place in a white male-dominated academic world. The first is of historical Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya, who was lauded as a pioneer for women in science but only after […]

Applied Math Seminar: Measurement Error Modeling using Empirical Phase Functions (Prof. Cornelis Potgieter, Southern Methodist University)

Emmy Noether Room, Millikan 1021, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, California

Measurement error, formally defined as the difference between the measured value and the true value of a quantity of interest, is ubiquitous. When a doctor takes your blood pressure, the instrumentation may not be properly calibrated and the reading is subject to error. When completing an online Harry Potter Sorting Hat quiz, you may accidentally […]

When is the product of Siegel eigenforms an eigenform? (Jim Brown, Occidental College)

Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

Modular forms are ubiquitous in modern number theory.  For instance, showing that elliptic curves are secretly modular forms was the key to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.  In addition to number theory, modular forms show up in diverse areas such as coding theory and particle physics.  Roughly speaking, a modular form is a complex-valued […]

Pull Out All The Stops: Textual Analysis via Punctuation Sequences (Mason Porter, UCLA)

Shanahan B460, Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA, United States

Abstract: Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em-dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvelously […]