Seminars and Colloquiums
for the week
January 23, 2006
SPEAKERS:
Professor Xiaobing Feng, Monday
Professor Ken Stephenson, Wednesday
PProfessor Jie Xiong, Thursday
Professor Conrad Plaut, Thursday
Dr. Jim Conant, Friday
MONDAY, JANUARY 23, 2006
DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS AND APPLIED/COMPUTATIONAL MATH SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres Hall 309A
SPEAKER: Dr. Lexing Ying
TITLE: The Phase Flow Method and High Frequency Wave Propagation
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2006
ANALYSIS SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres Hall 309A
SPEAKER: Professor Ken Stephenson
TITLE: “Conformal Mapping via Schwarz-Christoffel.”
THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2006
PROBABILITY SEMINAR
TIME: 10:10 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
ROOM: Ayres Hall 209A
SPEAKER: Professor Jie Xiong
TITLE: Mean-variance portfolio selection under partial information (III)
JUNIOR COLLOQUIUM
TIME: 3:30 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres Hall 214
SPEAKER: Professor Conrad Plaut
TITLE: What’s the point of studying surfaces that aren’t smooth?
ABSTRACT The surfaces that you study in calculus are always smoothexcept
maybe an occasional cone, although you don’t try to do calculus at the
point of the cone! But when a computer is processing the image of a surface,
even a “smooth” one, and the data it receives are finite and describe
a surface that is not smooth, but rather has thousands of vertices joined
by tiny edges. The computer has to make sense of this data, sometimes even
having to figure out where the surface is within the “cloud” of
vertices. Understanding such a surface can be less like calculus and more
like combinatorics. In this talk I’ll discuss features of the intrinsic
geometry of a surface, smooth or not, including describing some geometric
features that have been used in modern image processing problems. I’ll
also bring up the old unsolved problem of Alexandrov that I mentioned in a
previous JC and wonder aloud if there might be a way to use combinatorics
to solve it. Don’t worry if you weren’t at the previous talkor
were there but forgot everything about it. Very little mathematics background
is neededI don’t think I’ll actually compute anything this
time. Just draw lots of pictures.
Pizza will be served .
FRIDAY, January 27, 2006
TOPOLOGY SEMINAR
TIME: 12:20 p.m. – 1:20 p.m.
ROOM: 209B Ayres Hall
SPEAKER: Dr. Jim Conant
TITLE: A new and exciting approach to rational homotopy theory III
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