Title: Slope gap distributions of translation surfaces Speaker: Taylor McAdam, Department of Mathematics, Pomona College Abstract: How “random” are the rational numbers? To make sense of this question, let us consider the set of Farey fractions of level n—that is, the rational numbers between 0 and 1 with denominator at most n. It turns out that these distribute uniformly in the […]
During this student-centered Applied Math Seminar, there will be discussion and presentations about upcoming courses offered in applied mathematics, to help students make their enrollment choices for Spring 2024 and […]
We study variants of the Frobenius coin-exchange problem: Given n positive relatively prime parameters, what is the largest integer that cannot be represented as a nonnegative integral linear combination of the […]
Title: Contact structures and the mapping class group of lens spaces Abstract: One important problem in contact topology is to classify contact structures on a given manifold. Around 20 years […]
Title: Lonely Runners and My Favorite Polyhedron Speaker: Matthias Beck, Department of Mathematics, San Francisco State University Abstract: We study the Lonely Runner Conjecture, conceived by Wills in the 1960's, and originally phrased in terms of Diophantine approximation: Given positive integers n_1, n_2, ..., n_k, there exists a positive real number t such that for all […]
Title: On the Composition of Classical Mechanical Systems Abstract: Compositionality is a basic principle for understanding the physical world. The underlying idea is to study a system by studying the […]
True Grit: Writing the History of Women at Yerkes Observatory, 1895–1950 Abstract: Women at Yerkes Observatory earned advanced degrees, conducted their own research, collaborated on projects with peers of both […]
The Ehrhart polynomial of a lattice polytope P counts the number of integer points in the nth integral dilate of P. The f^* -vector of P, introduced by Felix Breuer in 2012, is the vector of coefficients of the Ehrhart polynomial with respect to the binomial coefficient basis . Similarly to h and h^* -vectors, […]
On November 14th, Tuesday from 3-4pm in Fletcher 110, Geometry and Topology Seminar invites students and faculty to a course preview session devoted to a discussion and presentations about upcoming […]
Title: Adinkra Heights and Color-Splitting Rainbows Speaker: Ursula Whitcher, American Mathematical Society Abstract: Adinkras are decorated graphs that encapsulate information about conjectural relationships between fundamental particles in physics. If we color the edges of an Adinkra with a rainbow of shades in a specific order, we obtain a special curve that we can study usingalgebraic […]
The Effros-Shen algebra corresponding to an irrational number $\theta$ can be described by an inductive sequence of direct sums of matrix algebras, where the continued fraction expansion of $\theta$ encodes […]
