In 1968, Milnor famously conjectured that the smooth 4-genus of the torus knot T(p,q) is given by (p-1)(q-1)/2. This conjecture was first verified by Kronheimer and Mrowka in 1993 and has received several other proofs since then. In this talk, we discuss a nonorientable analogue of this conjecture, first formulated by Josh Batson. We prove […]
Uniform Convergence is a one-woman play, written and performed by mathematics graduate student Corrine Yap. It juxtaposes the stories of two women trying to find their place in a white male-dominated academic world. The first is of historical Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya, who was lauded as a pioneer for women in science but only after […]
Measurement error, formally defined as the difference between the measured value and the true value of a quantity of interest, is ubiquitous. When a doctor takes your blood pressure, the instrumentation may not be properly calibrated and the reading is subject to error. When completing an online Harry Potter Sorting Hat quiz, you may accidentally […]
Job Talk: Christina Edholm, University of Tennessee "Epidemiological models examining two susceptible classes" Monday, February 25 4:00-4:50pm Balch 218, Scripps College
Modular forms are ubiquitous in modern number theory. For instance, showing that elliptic curves are secretly modular forms was the key to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In addition […]
Abstract: Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em-dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvelously […]
One foundational pillar of low dimensional topology is the connection between link invariants and 3-manifold invariants. One generalization of this has been given by Reshetikhin and Turaev to a surgery theory for colored ribbon graphs. Then to complete the analogy rather than 3-manifold invariants we now have a 2+1 dimensional topology quantum field theory (TQFT). […]
Candidate for Assistant Professor in Mathematics Howard Levinson, University of Michigan Seeing Clearly Through a Microscope The goal of microscope imaging is to obtain high-resolution images of cells. However, due […]
One very important concept in understanding a dynamical system is coherent structure. Such structure segments the domain into different regions with similar behavior according to a quantity. When we try […]
TOPIC: Graph Theory, Part II On the surface, graphs seem to be some of the simplest objects you might encounter in mathematics. After all, they are made up of just […]
I will present mathematical and computational methods used to model interactions between a viscous fluid and elastic structures in biological processes. For example, microfluidic devices carry very small volumes of liquid through channels and may be used to gain insight into many biological applications including drug delivery and development, but mixing and pumping at this […]
Chebotarev's theorem on roots of unity says that every minor of a discrete Fourier transform matrix of prime order is nonzero. We present a generalization of this result that includes […]
