In 1897, Indiana physician Edwin J. Goodwin believed he had discovered a way to square the circle, and proposed a bill to Indiana Representative Taylor I. Record which would secure Indiana's the claim to fame for his discovery.  About the time the debate about the bill concluded, Purdue University professor Clarence A. Waldo serendipitously came […]

I will talk about a few graph-theoretic metrics then introduce the concept of refinements on a class of functions that include all metrics. As a case study, we will construct various refinements on the shortest-path distance. Consequently, we obtain a few "better" versions of the Erdos number. In the course of our investigation, we realized various construction […]

A Fibonomial is what is obtained when you replace each term of the binomial coefficients $ {n \choose k}$ by the corresponding Fibonacci number.  For example, the Fibonomial $${ 6\brace 3 } = \frac{F_6 \cdot F_5 \cdot \dots \cdot F_1}{(F_3\cdot F_2 \cdot F_1)(F_3\cdot F_2 \cdot F_1)} = \frac{8\cdot5\cdot3\cdot2\cdot1\cdot1}{(2\cdot1\cdot1)(2\cdot1\cdot1)} = 60$$ since the first six Fibonacci […]

For centuries finding the determinant of a matrix was considered to be something that took $\Theta(n^3)$ steps.  Only in 1969 did Strassen discover that there was a faster method.  In this talk I'll discuss his finding, how the Master Theorem for divide-and-conquer plays into it, and how it was shown that finding determinants, inverting matrices, […]