Title: Solving the Race in Backgammon Speaker: Prof. Arthur Benjamin Smallwood Family Professor of Mathematics Harvey Mudd College Abstract: Backgammon is perhaps the oldest game that is still played today. It is a game that combines luck with skill, where two players take turns rolling dice and decide how to move their checkers […]
Title: Modeling Zoonotic Infectious Diseases from Wildlife to Humans Speaker: Prof. Linda J. S. Allen, P. W. Horn Distinguished Professor Emeritus Texas Tech University Abstract: Zoonotic infectious diseases are diseases transmitted from animals to humans. It is estimated that over 60% of human infectious diseases are zoonotic. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified eight priority zoonoses […]
Title: Pareto optimization of resonances and optimal control methods Abstract: First successes in fabrication of high-Q optical cavities two decades ago led to active applied physics and numerical studies of […]
This talk is based on joint work with Jens Marklof, and with Roland Roeder. The three distance theorem states that, if x is any real number and N is any […]
(Joint with Ichihara, Jong, and Saito). We show that two-bridge knots admit no purely cosmetic surgeries, ie no pair of distinct Dehn surgeries on such a knot produce 3-manifolds that […]
Title: On sparse geometry of numbers Speaker: Prof. Lenny Fukshansky, Department of Mathematics, Claremont McKenna College Abstract: Geometry of Numbers is an area of mathematics pioneered by Hermann Minkowski at the end of the 19th century. He achieved stunning success introducing a novel geometric framework into the study of algebraic numbers, prompting mathematicians of later generations to compare […]
By Hilbert’s theorem 90, if K is a cyclic number field with Galois group generated by g, then any element of norm 1 can be written as a/g(a). This gives rise to a natural height function on elements of norm 1. I’ll discuss equidistribution problems and show that these norm 1 elements are equidistributed (in […]
We talk about building knots using mosaics which were as introduced as a way of modeling quantum knots by Lomonaco and Kauffman and a newer variant, hexagonal mosaics, introduced by […]
The Field Committee Meeting is our chance to socialize with our colleagues and coordinate our course offerings for the coming academic year (2022-2023). Please come to discuss course offerings and other synergistic items. Refreshments in the Shanahan sunken courtyard at HMC starting at 4:00, meeting in Shanahan B460 at 4:20. We will be back in […]
Title: Connections between Iterative Methods for Linear Systems and Consensus Dynamics on Networks Abstract: There is a well-established linear algebraic lens for studying consensus dynamics on networks, which has yielded […]
We describe a natural way to continuously extend arithmetic functions that admit a Ramanujan expansion and derive the conditions under which such an extension exists. In particular, we show that the absolute convergence of a Ramanujan expansion does not guarantee the convergence of its real variable generalization. We take the divisor function as a case […]
The Jones polynomial is an invariant of knots in R^3. Following a proposal of Witten, it was extended to knots in 3-manifolds by Reshetikhin-Turaev using quantum groups. Khovanov homology is […]
