Thursday, December 1, 2011
Arielle Saiber, Associate Professor of Italian, Bowdoin College.
“Niccolo’ Tartaglia’s Poetic Solution to the Cubic Equation”
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm, 421 Neville Hall.
University of Maine mathematics master’s student Trevor Vadas will be speaking in Thursday’s seminar: “Irrational Rotations and Invariant Sets.” The abstract for his talk is here.
Thursday, November 17, 3:30 pm, in 108 Neville Hall.
Mathematics Documentary!
Tuesday, November 15, 12:30 – 1:30 P.M.
421 Neville Hall
Cookies and drinks at 12:30, Video at 12:45
Dangerous Knowledge (Part 2) [Part 1 was shown the previous week.]
In this BBC documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all to committing suicide.
Pizza Pi!
Tuesday, November 8, 12:30 – 1:30 P.M.
421 Neville Hall
Pizza at 12:30, Video at 12:45
Dangerous Knowledge (Part 1) [Part 2 will be shown the following week when dessert will be served.]
In this BBC documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians – Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing – whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all to committing suicide.
University of Maine mathematics master’s student Emily Igo will be speaking in this week’s seminar: “An introduction to partition theory,” Thursday, November 3, 3:30 pm, in 108 Neville Hall. The abstract for her talk is here.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Prof. Ali Abedi, UMaine Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“Smart Battery-Free Wireless Sensing”
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm, 100 Neville Hall.
Battery-free wireless sensors developed at the University of Maine under a cooperative agreement with NASA enable a myriad of applications ranging from structural health monitoring to biomedical and space explorations to name a few. Embedding these sensors in structures without the need for changing batteries, their rugged design to withstand harsh environments, and coded communication with multiple access features makes this new technology a desirable candidate for a variety of aerospace and civil infrastructure monitoring applications. This talk presents mathematical theories behind sensor design, communication schemes, and multi tier networking strategies developed to deliver a reliable wireless sensor system.
The annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is a contest for undergraduate mathematics students. Students compete as individuals and as a team representing their university. This year it will be held on Saturday, Dec. 3. Interested students should contact Prof. Ali Ozluk on First Class.
Martin Gardner was a writer specializing in recreational mathematics. His monthly column in Scientific American from 1956-1981 had a profound impact, attracting many young people into mathematics. In celebration of what would have been Martin Gardner’s 97th birthday, there will be Celebration of Mind gatherings all over the world on Friday, October 21st. These events are intended to highlight Martin’s life and work, and continue his pursuit of a playful and fun approach to Mathematics, Science, Art, Magic, Puzzles and all of his other interests and writings. Everyone is encouraged to bring a magic trick, puzzle, recreational mathematics problem or story about Martin to share. Join us on Friday, October 21, 2011, 2:30 p.m.— 4:00 p.m. in 108 Neville Hall. For more information, contact Rick Eason or Robert Franzosa. More information on the global event can be found here.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Dr. Jonathan Farley, UMaine Dept. of Computer Science.
“The Most Embarrassing Inequality of My Life”
Matchings in the Permutation Lattice
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm, 421 Neville Hall.
“Can you do it?”
In the spring of 1997, Anders Björner, a visitor at Berkeley’s Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, sent me a handwritten note in response to a question I had asked him. He wanted to know if I could prove, combinatorially, for an n-element poset of height r, that hk≥hn-1-k when k < (n-1)/2. I had been hunting this inequality for perhaps the previous four or five years. I believed that any fact about ordered sets, except artificially-rigged statements, must be provable by order-theoretic means. To my embarrassment, however, I could not deduce this inequality combinatorially. Nor could I concede defeat.
Perhaps I should explain.
Tuesday, Sept. 27, 12:30pm – 1:20pm in Room 421 of Neville Hall.
Speaker: Kevin Roberge, Mathematics Instructor and Graduate Student of Physics.
Pizza will be served!
Image Description: Rubik's Cube
