This talk discusses a puzzle called “Spinning Switches,” based on a problem popularized by Martin Gardner in his February 1979 column of “Mathematical Games". This puzzle can be generalized to a two-player game on a finite wreath products. This talk will provide a classification of several families of these generalized puzzles, including a full classification […]
Title: Between Yes and No: making decisions under uncertainty. Speaker: Ami Radunskaya, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Pomona College Abstract: Often we attempt to answer a question with a “yes” or a “no” by developing predictive models (“Will the small remaining population of axolotls survive outside of their native wetlands?”) or by implementing binary classifiers (“Is this […]
Title: Understanding scientific fields with network analysis and topic modeling Abstract: As scientific disciplines get larger, it becomes impossible for an individual researcher to be familiar with the entire body of […]
The slice rank polynomial method, motivated by groundbreaking work of Croot, Lev and Pach and refined by Tao, has opened the door to the resolution of many problems in extremal combinatorics. We survey these results and discuss contributions in several of the speaker's recent papers.
Title: How do mathematicians believe? Speaker: Brian P Katz (BK), Department of Mathematics and Statistics, CSU, Long Beach Abstract: Love it or hate it, many people believe that mathematics gives humans access […]
Let \mathcal{L}(X,Y) denote the normed vector space of all continuous operators from \(X\) to \(Y\), \(X^*\) be the dual space of \(X\), and \(\mathcal{K}(X,Y)\) denote the collection of all compact operators from \(X\) to \(Y\). Denote by \(T^{*} \in \mathcal{L}(Y^{*}, X^{*} )\) the adjoint operator of \(T\in \mathcal{L} (X, Y)\). The well known theorem of […]
Title: Approximating Quasi-Stationary Distributions with Interacting Reinforced Markov Chains Abstract: An important question in ecology is what conditions must be met for a population of interacting species to coexist. In […]
Given a lattice L, an extension of L is a lattice M of strictly greater rank so that L is equal to the intersection of the subspace spanned by L with M. In this talk, we will discus constructions of such lattice extensions with particular geometric invariants of M, such as the determinant, covering radius […]
Title: Human Computers in Astronomy: Women Astronomers at Mount Wilson Observatory during the Early Twentieth Century Speaker: Eun-Joo Ahn, Department of History, UC Santa Barbara Abstract: Mount Wilson Observatory was founded […]
Quantum metrics in the sense of Rieffel were introduced to prove some statements arising in the high-energy physics literature. Since then, the area of quantum metric geometry has been used to answer questions stemming from within mathematics as well. To prove such results, it is often the case that certain properties of a quantum metric […]
The relation of accessible points in a projective incidence plane defined by Coxeter in the 1960s is the focus of my narrative. It reveals historical pathways bookending the 19th and 20th centuries that bring G.K.C. von Staudt, Mario Pieri, Marvin Greenberg and others into the conversation. The published references to Coxeter’s theory, including his own, […]
