WHAT IS GEMS: The Gateway to Exploring Mathematics program (GEMS) is a series of workshops that helps excite the interests and curiosity of young students in mathematics and science GEMS meets once a month on a Saturday morning from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM GEMS is designed to reach 8th, 9th and 10th grade students […]
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 […]
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 […]
Locust swarms pose a major threat to agriculture, notably in northern Africa and the Middle East. In the early stages of aggregation, locusts form hopper bands. These are coordinated groups […]
The Bateman—Horn Conjecture is a far-reaching statement about the distribution of the prime numbers. It implies many known results, such as the Green—Tao theorem, and a variety of famous conjectures, […]
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.
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.
A single soap bubble has a spherical shape since it minimizes its surface area subject to a fixed enclosed volume of air. When two soap bubbles collide, they form a […]
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 […]
Abstract: Bats in North America have been dying off due to the invasion of a fungal disease (White Nose Syndrome). In this talk, I'll present a very simple linear algebraic model to predict the magnitude of the die-offs. By comparing these models to some data about actual bat survival, my collaborator and I also hypothesized […]
TOPIC: Exploring the fascinating world of prime numbers, Part I The study of patterns in the sequence of prime numbers has fascinated mathematicians for centuries. Are there formulas that generate prime numbers? Are there patterns in the distribution of prime numbers and the distribution of gaps between consecutive primes? In this series of two workshops, beginning […]
The exchange algorithm enables Bayesian posterior inference for models with intractable likelihoods, such as Ising, Potts, or exponential random graph models (ERGM). Crucially, this algorithm relies on an auxiliary Markov […]
