• Modeling Mechanisms of Ovulatory (Dys)Function (Erica Graham, Bryn Mawr College)

    Argue Auditorium, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    A normally functioning menstrual cycle requires significant crosstalk between hormones originating in ovarian and brain tissues. Reproductive hormone dysregulation may disrupt function and can lead to infertility, as occurs in the common endocrine disorder polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). In this talk, I will discuss a mathematical model of the ovulatory cycle that accounts for mechanisms […]

  • State Polytopes of Combinatorial Neural Codes (Rob Davis, HMC)

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

    Combinatorial neural codes are 0/1 vectors that are used to model the co-firing patterns of a set of place cells in the brain. One wide-open problem in this area is […]

  • Applications of Cayley Digraphs to Waring’s Problem and Sum-Product Formulas (Yesim Demiroglu, Harvey Mudd)

    Argue Auditorium, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract: In this talk, we first present some elementary new proofs (using Cayley digraphs and spectral graph theory) for Waring's problem over finite fields, and explain how in the process of re-proving these results, we obtain an original result that provides an analogue of Sarkozy's theorem in the finite field setting (showing that any subset […]

  • Great Expectations (Matthew Junge, Duke Univ.)

    Argue Auditorium, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    The mean of a random quantity is supposed to confirm our expectations. What happens when it defies them? We will look at a few famous expected values; some old, some new, all great.

  • Isometric Circle Actions (Catherline Searle, Wichita State)

    Argue Auditorium, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    I will begin by describing a number of important examples of isometric actions of circles in Euclidean space and their restrictions to subspaces of Euclidean space. The goal of the talk will be to see how isometric actions of circles and tori can be used to "recognize" the space on which they are acting.

  • Uniform asymptotic growth of symbolic powers (Robert Walker, University of Michigan)

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

    Algebraic geometry (AG) is a major generalization of linear algebra which is fairly influential in mathematics. Since the 1980's with the development of computer algebra systems like Mathematica, AG has been leveraged in areas of STEM as diverse as statistics, robotic kinematics, computer science/geometric modeling, and mirror symmetry. Part one of my talk will be a […]