BC Distinguished Lecturer in Mathematics series
| 2007-2008 | |
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Professor John Horton Conway is the holder of the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University. Dr. Conway has made significant contributions in a number of mathematical fields: the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, game theory, coding theory, tiling, and the creation of new number systems. He also is noted for his interest in mathematical games, and is the inventor of the "Game of Life", a computer simulation of simple cellular "life" in which simple rules give rise to amazingly complex behavior. | |
| Monday, March 17 |
"The Surreal Numbers" Higgins Hall, Room 310 at 4:00 p.m. Intended for general audiences |
| Tuesday, March 18 |
"What are all the best sphere-packings in low dimensions?" Higgins Hall, Room 225 at 4:30 p.m. Intended for mathematically sophisticated audiences |
| Wednesday, March 19 |
"What can a finite machine do?" Campion Hall, Room 303 at 11:00 a.m. Intended for mathematically sophisticated audiences |
BC Math Society/Mathematics Department Undergraduate Lecture
| 2007-2008 | |
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Dr. Barry Cipra is a prolific mathematics writer. He is a Contributing Correspondent for Science magazine, and the author of a number of popular math books including the series "What's happening in the mathematical sciences?", for which he won the Joint Policy Board in Mathematical Sciences Communication Award in 2005. | |
| Tuesday, February 19 |
"SeVenn, EleVenn, and Beyond" Abstract: The speaker will report on recent results on the existence of rotationally symmetric Venn diagrams -- a problem first posed by an undergraduate in the 1960s, and finally fully solved, by another undergraduate, almost 40 years later. Many related open problems remain, perhaps for yet another undergraduate to solve. Carney Hall 103, at 5:00 p.m. Intended for general audiences |
BC Geometry and Topology Seminar
Martin Bridgeman, Rob Meyerhoff, and Tao Li conduct this seminar on the BC Campus.
| 2007-2008 | |
| Thursday, April 17 |
Shawn Rafalski (Williams College) will speak in 251 Carney Hall at 1:00 p.m. "Immersions of Hyperbolic Turnovers in 3-Orbifolds" |
| Thursday, March 13 |
Constance Leidy (Wesleyan Univ.) will speak in 251 Carney Hall at 1:00 p.m. "Knot Concordance and Blanchfield Duality" |
| Thursday, January 31 |
Helen Wong (Bowdoin College) will speak in 309 Carney Hall at 4:15 p.m.. "SO(3) quantum invariants and Heegaard genus" |
| Tuesday, November 6 |
Yvonne Lai (University of California at Davis) will speak in 251 Carney Hall at 2:00 p.m. "An Effective Compactness Theorem for Coxeter Groups" We give such a bound for Coxeter groups. We find that either the group has a small splitting or there is a constant C and a point in H^n that is moved no more than C by any generator. |
| Thursday, November 1 |
Jesse Johnson (Yale University) will speak in 251 Carney Hall at 2:00 p.m.. "The Mapping Class Group of a Heegaard splitting of the 3-torus" |
BC Number Theory Seminar
Avner Ash, Sol Friedberg, Rob Gross, and Mark Reeder conduct this seminar on the BC Campus.
| 2007-2008 | |
| Tuesday, March 11 |
Robert Pollack (Boston University) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. "Stickelberger elements of non-ordinary modular forms" |
| Tuesday, December 4 |
Ju-Lee Kim (MIT) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. "On generic supercuspidal representations of classical groups" |
| Thursday, November 15 |
Akshay Venkatesh (New York University) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. "The geometry of counting number fields" When we think of higher degree number fields (e.g. cubic) "admissible" discriminants can sometimes not occur at all, and sometimes occur many times. But, rather surprisingly - if you count things in a suitable way - we believe that the MEAN occurrence number is still exactly one. This is a slight reformulation of a conjecture of Manjul Bhargava and I think it is quite amazing (and puzzling). In this talk we'll try to understand why this might be true mainly by looking at function fields. We shall discuss how it relates to questions about topology of Hurwitz spaces and combinatorial group theory, and finally come back to try to make some further predictions about the number field case. We can prove fairly little (so far ...) and so the talk will be somewhat speculative. |
BC Colloquium Series
Rob Gross, Ben Howard and Tao Li conduct this seminar on the BC Campus.
| 2007-2008 | |
| Tuesday, April 8 |
Thomas Hull (Merrimack College) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. Abstract: Given a flat origami crease pattern, it is very much an open question to determine the number of ways it can fold flat, where each is distinguished by gaving a different mountain-valley assignment. Recursive formulas exist for counting the number of ways a single, flat-foldable vertex in a crease pattern can fold flat, but that's pretty much where our knowledge on the matter ends. In this talk we will delve more deeply into the single vertex case by trying to characterize flat vertex folds of a given degree into classes whose membership is determined by the number of ways they can fold flat. This leads to descriptions of the configuration spaces for flat vertex folds of a given degree. In general, the configuration space of a flat vertex fold of degree 2n will be a 2n-1-dimensional polytope with collections of lower-dimensional subspaces representing the various classes. We will describe the n=2 and 3 cases and eventually see that the polytope for the degree 2n case is the sum of two (n-1)-dimensional simplices. |
| Thursday, March 27 |
Christian Zickert (Columbia University) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. Abstract: Let M be a hyperbolic manifold. If M is complete and of finite volume, it follows from Mostow rigidity that the volume is a topological invariant of M. The Chern-Simons invariant is defined by integrating a certain 3-form over a section of the orthonormal frame bundle. It can be regarded as the imaginary part of a complex volume with the real part being the usual volume. In this talk we shall discuss methods of computing the complex volume from purely topological descriptions of M. As a result, we obtain a very efficient algorithm for computing the Chern-Simons invariant. |
| Thursday, February 28 |
Ken Bromberg (University of Utah) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15.
Abstract: An infinite volume hyperbolic 3-manifold has many distinct hyperbolic structures. The deformation space of all such hyperbolic structures is a fractal object that has many similarities with the more well-known Mandelbrot set. We will survey what is known about the topology of these deformation spaces and give some indication of the techniques that are used in their study. |
| Monday, February 18 |
William Jaco (Oklahoma State University) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15.
Abstract: We will present an exposition on three decision problems coming from 3-manifold topology. The selected problems are: "Recognition of the 3-sphere", "the knot triviality problem", and the "word problem". These three problems provide a nice overview of the theory and methods used in approaching decision problems and algorithms in 3-manifold topology. |
| Thursday, November 8 |
Bjorn Poonen (UC Berkeley) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. "Lattice Polygons and the Number 12" |
| Thursday, November 1 |
Mike King (Boston College) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. "Cluster Algebras and Triangulations" Abstract: |
| Thursday, October 25 |
Slava Krushkal (University of Virginia) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. "An Approach to Chromatic Polynomial via Quantum Topology" |
| Thursday, October 18 |
Richard Schwartz (Brown University) will speak in 309 Carney Hall. Refreshments at 4:00 p.m, followed by a talk at 4:15. "Outer Billiards on Kites" |
Boston Area Links
The Mathematical Gazette is published weekly by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Mathematical Sciences Department. It provides a list of mathematical seminars and colloquia in the Massachusetts area.