It’s that time of year again- when the senior Mathematics majors give talks on their Capstone papers. Come hear what they have been working on. The schedule of lectures and list of topics are here.
All students of Calculus I and II (MAT 126-127) were invited to participate in this year’s Mathematics Contest. The test consisted of three challenging calculus problems, to be solved over one weekend, and turned in on November 14th, 2012.
The results are in, and the following cash awards were given:
Calculus I (26 participants)
First Prize winner, $150: Aleksander Cole
Second Prize winners, $75 each: Channosphea But, Riley Mattor, John Mucrose
Third Prize winners, $40 each: Jenn Seneres, Samuel Wallace
Calculus II (18 participants)
First Prize: No winner
Second Prize winners, $100 each: Hue Weon Hwang, Maso Urban
Third Prize winners, $50 each: Mitche Beroit, Yi Peg.
Congratulations to the winners!
The department of Mathematics and Statistics ran a contest in 2011 for Calculus students. There were 37 contestants, 25 enrolled into Calculus I and 12 into Calculus II. Students of Calculus I and II were given different sets of problems and were not competing with each other.
| Place | Name | Class | Prize |
| First | Nathan Dunn Elliot Ossana |
Calc II Calc II |
$125 $125 |
| Second | Andrew Dicbeon Nicholas Carter Albano Drazhi Aman Maskay |
Calc I Calc I Calc I Calc I |
$75 $75 $75 $75 |
| Third | Jaime Potvin Connor Chu |
Calc I Calc II |
$50 $50 |
| Honorable Mention | Taylor Plaisted Curtis Tompson Hannah Dewey Kyle Nolan Gwendolyn Beacham |
Calc I Calc II Calc II Calc II Calc II |
$25* $25* $25* $25* $25* |
* UMaine Bookstore gift certificate
The Contest Committee also recommended Calculus instructors to award the above contestants with extra credit points.
Stay tuned for the announcement of the 2012 contest!
Stuart Lathrop has been awarded a CLAS Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Fellowship for this year. Mr. Lathrop, who is a senior math major, won the $1400 fellowship for his proposal entitled Contributions to the Foundations of the Theory of Transcendental Numbers. He is writing an extensive survey on the theorem of Gelfand and Schneider asserting that αβ is transcendental whenever α is an algebraic number number different from 0 and 1, and β is an irrational algebraic number. This project grew out of Stuart’s Mathematics Capstone paper on transcendental numbers. He will present his work at the CUGR Showcase in the spring. He is being advised on the project by Chip Snyder and Andrew Knightly.
The annual Québec/Maine Number Theory Conference took place on the weekend of September 29-30. The conference was co-organized by number theorists at the Unversity of Maine and at Laval University in Québec City. This year, the conference was dedicated to the memory of UMaine mathematician Ali Ozluk, who passed away last year. Prof. Peter Sarnak, a number theorist at Princeton University, gave a lecture touching on aspects of Ali’s work. UMaine professors David Bradley and Andrew Knightly also gave talks on their research.
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Pi Mu Epsilon / Pizza Pi talk
Thursday, April 5, 2012, 11:30am-12:30pm.
Neville 421
Pizza at 11:30 am, Talk 11:50-12:30.
Dr. Eisso Atzema, University of Maine Math Department
Lessons on Train Schedules: From String Charts to Teaching Tools.
The early 20th-century was a time of major reforms in the teaching of mathematics all across the Western world. Among the many changes that were adopted was an increased emphasis on the use of the function concept in its various representations (sounds familiar?). In particular, in a very short time span, graphical illustrations of functions became commonplace in mathematics textbooks.
In this presentation, I will talk about the inclusion of so-called graphical railroad time tables (see figure above) as an example of such a graphical illustration. Among other things, I will discuss the origins of this real-life application of mathematics, its actual use, and how its inclusion in the textbooks evolved over time.
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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.
