• Mathematics: Pure, Applied, A Liberal Art ( Al Erisman, Seattle Pacific University)

    Shanahan B460, Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA, United States

    From the view of a pure mathematician, those working in pure mathematics produce pure knowledge. Whether used or not, it has a great elegance and value in and of itself. Those in applied mathematics simply pick up what has been done and use it in designing or building things. Number theory is often used to […]

  • The Roger-Yang Arc Algebra (Helen Wong, CMC)

    Roberts North 104, CMC 320 E. 9th St., Claremont, CA, United States

      Based on geometric considerations, J. Roger and T. Yang in 2014 defined a version of the Kauffman bracket skein algebra for punctured surfaces that includes arcs going from puncture […]

  • Lattices from group frames and vertex transitive graphs (Lenny Fukshansky, CMC)

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

    Tight frames in Euclidean spaces are widely used convenient generalizations of orthonormal bases. A particularly nice class of such frames is generated as orbits under irreducible actions of finite groups […]

  • Algebraic and Polyhedral Perspectives on Combinatorial Neural Codes (Robert Davis, Harvey Mudd)

    Shanahan B460, Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA, United States

    In the 1970s, James O’Keefe and his team observed that certain neurons in the brain, called place cells, spike in their firing rates when the animal is in a particular physical location within its arena. If a place cell is thought of as either “active” or “silent,” then one may represent the co-firing patterns of […]

  • Subgraph statistics (Benny Sudakov, ETH Zurich)

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

    Given integers $k,l$  and a graph $G$, how large can be the fraction of $k$-vertex subsets of $G$ which span exactly $l$ edges?  The systematic study of this very natural  […]

  • Cracking the Code: Predicting Properties of Material Fracture Networks using Machine Learning (Allon Percus, CGU)

    Shanahan B460, Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA, United States

    Understanding how fluid flows through heterogeneous materials, and how it can make these materials fail, are among the hardest challenges in materials science.  Experiments and simulations show that flow through subsurface rock is mostly limited to a small subnetwork, or backbone, of fractures.  Identifying this backbone would allow for a large speedup in flow and […]

  • Job Talk – Nicole Fider, UC Irvine

    Candidate for Assistant Professor in Mathematics, Scripps College A surprising application of mathematics:  How to name a color Your brain likes patterns and categories; by grouping related ideas together, it […]

  • Knowledge, strategies, and know-how (Pavel Naumov, CMC)

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

    An agent comes to a fork in a road. There is a sign that says that one of the two roads leads to prosperity and another to death. The agent […]

  • Personal Perspectives on m-ary Partitions (James Sellers, Penn State)

    Shanahan B460, Harvey Mudd College 301 Platt Blvd., Claremont, CA, United States

    Abstract:  A great deal of my research journey has involved the study of m-ary partitions.  These are integer partitions wherein each part must be a power of a fixed integer m > 1.  Beginning in the late 1960s, numerous mathematicians (including Churchhouse, Andrews, Gupta, and Rodseth) studied divisibility properties of m-ary partitions.  In this talk, I will discuss work I completed […]