Shanahan 1480, Harvey Mudd College

TOPIC: The Mathematics of Reapportionment and Census Data Every ten years, the United States Census Bureau conducts a count of all persons living in the United States; one of those population counts will be carried out this year (2020). This Census is mandated by the US Constitution; it counts all people residing in the United […]

  TOPIC: Superheroes vs. Supercomputers Superheroes like Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Superman, and Captain Marvel, just to name a few, all have "super" power and they save the world from "super"-villains. Well, just one catch--they are not real. In our real world, there are computers built for super power to save the (real) world. In this […]

TOPIC: Working Together without a Leader Bees all work together by communicating and obeying the orders of the Queen. Other animals gather in swarms, flocks, or schools and move in complicated ways without any leader at all. In a school of fish, each one is identical and they all follow the same simple rules. Yet they still […]

TOPIC: The Mathematics of Information We are surrounded by information. Words in books, ones and zeros in computers, mathematical equations, and DNA sequences are all examples of information, but can we say something more about it? In this workshop, we will learn about the mathematics of information, see how it is related to concepts from […]

TOPIC: Symmetry Symmetry seems to be an important idea in mathematics, but how do mathematicians think about symmetry? In this workshop, we’ll talk about mathematical objects called groups, see how they are used to describe symmetry, and then put them to work to help us answer some nontrivial counting problems. WHAT IS GEMS: The Gateway to […]

TOPIC: Graphs, matrices, and recurrences Abstract: In mathematics, we are often surprised to find that problems that look very different are actually the same problem in a different guise! In this seminar, we will build on the previous discussions about graph theory and describe how other areas of math are closely related to graphs. Specifically, […]