Seminars and Colloquiums
for the week of February 4, 2013
Speakers:
Mr. Ernest Jum, Monday
Prof. Paul Bourdon, Wednesday
Mr. Kyle Austin, Thursday
Dr. Amy Sczcepanski, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Thursday
*** Tea Time this week will be Monday - Wednesday at 3:00 pm.
Hosted this week by Amanda, Grace, and Josh. Everyone is welcome! ***
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4
PROBABILITY SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 - 4:25
ROOM: Ayres 122
SPEAKER: Mr. Ernest Jum
TITLE: Jump-adapted discretization schemes for Levy driven SDEs
ABSTRACT: An algorithm for weak approximation of stochastic differential equations driven by pure jump Levy processes is presented. The method uses adaptive non-uniform discretization based on the times of large jumps of the driving process. To approximate the solution between these times, the small jump noise is replaced with a Brownian motion. This technique avoids the simulation of the increments of the Levy process and in many cases achieves a better rate of convergence than the traditional Euler scheme with equal time steps.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6
ANALYSIS SEMINAR
TIME: 3:35 - 4:25
ROOM: Ayres 112
SPEAKER: Prof. Paul Bourdon
TITLE: Weighted Composition Operators on Weighted Hardy Spaces
ABSTRACT: I'll introduce this class of operators, providing some observations about boundedness and invariant subspaces. Then I'll prove that for certain composition operators T on the classical Hardy space, T - I is "universal" in the sense that any Hilbert-space operator has a multiple that is similar to the restriction of T-I to one of its invariant subspaces. In a second talk, I'll present a characterization of Hermitian weighted composition operators generalizing one recently obtained by Cowen, Gunatilliake, and Ko.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7
TOPOLOGY SEMINAR
TIME: 9:40 - 10:30
ROOM: Ayres Hall B004
SPEAKER: Mr. Kyle Austin
TITLE: Partitions of Unity - 3
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this presentation is to introduce partitions of unity and their applications to topology and analysis. This should give an interesting new point of view for normal and paracompact spaces. The presentation will follow the paper "Partitions of Unity" by Jerzy Dydak. In particular, we will use partitions of unity to prove variants of Teitze Extension Theorem which in turn will be used to prove some classical results about normal and paracompact spaces. The notion of equicontinuous partitions of arbitrary functions will be introduced. We will use this idea to create certain partitions of unity with nice properties and to give a useful characterization of when a normal space is paracompact.
JUNIOR COLLOQUIUM
TIME: 3:35 - 4:25
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Dr. Amy Sczcepanski, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
TITLE: Big Data and Big Computers: Quantitative techniques for solving big problems
ABSTRACT: Technology has advanced to the point where data-driven solutions are replacing experts' hunches when it comes to decision making. The coverage of the 2012 presidential election included headlines like, "How Obama's data crunchers helped him win" (CNN, November 8), and Nate Silver is one of the most famous nerds in the country. An article in the New York Times Magazine (February 16, 2012) explains how Target extracts information from its transactions to make business decisions; grocery stores will give you a discount in exchange for tracking your data with a loyalty card. Tech companies, like Facebook and Google, use information about their users to sell ads. In the scientific realm, big data challenges appear in fields ranging from bio-informatics to astrophysics. Solving big data problems requires a clever mix of techniques from statistics, mathematics, and computer science. We will introduce the mathematics behind some of these strategies and talk about directions in the field. This talk should be accessible to any undergraduate with an interest in a quantitative field. (There may also be tangents about interesting mathematical applications to not-so-big data as well.)
Pizza will be available at 3:00.
If you are interested in giving or arranging a talk for one of our seminars or colloquiums,
please review our calendar.
If you have questions, or a date you would like to confirm, please contact colloquium AT math DOT utk DOT edu
Past notices:
Seminars from 2011-2012 academic year
Seminars from 2010-2011 academic year
Seminars from 2009-2010 academic year
Seminars from 2008-2009 academic year
Seminars from 2007-2008 academic year
Seminars from 2006-2007 academic year