Junior Colloquium
The Junior Colloquium is a series of talks intended for students interested in mathematics or related subjects. Usually offered every other Thursday at 3:35 in Ayres Hall, the talks attract students from a variety of majors on the UT campus. The JC always attracts a large and diverse audience, and students at all levels (and even faculty) are invited to attend. Anyone interested in receiving e-mail announcements about the JC (who is not already on the UTKMATH, seminarlist or pmail e-mail lists) should go to listserv.utk.edu and add his/her e-mail address to the JRCOLL listserv. The archives of JC speakers, titles, and abstracts are available here.
For those interested in speaking, the ground rules for speakers at the JC are as follows:
1. Talks should be accessible to anyone with a
good understanding of basic calculus.
2. Talks should appeal to a wide audience, which often includes engineering
and other non-math majors.
3. Talks should NOT be surveys of areas of mathematics or career talks.
4. Faculty may give talks as often as they wish, but the same talk may not be
given in two consecutive years (keep your notes for future use!).
The regular meeting time is Thursday at 3:30 pm in Ayres 215, roughly every other Thursday. Anyone who would like to receive notices about the JC should go to listserv.utk.edu and add his/her e-mail address to the JRCOLL listserv.
Below is the JC schedule so far this year--it will be updated as future talks are scheduled.
Previous subjects have ranged from quaternions to soap bubbles to tornadoes, and previous speakers have included UT faculty and invited visitors from other universities. Potential speakers should contact Ken Stephenson in the Math Department for more information.
Spring 2008
Dr. Anand Godpole, East Tennessee State University
Time: 3:40 p.m., Friday, April 11. Refreshments and pizza at the door starting at 3:30.
Place: Ayres 214
"Undergraduate Research in Combinatorics"
Dr. Ivars Peterson
Time: 3:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 8. Refreshments and pizza at the door starting at 3:20.
Place: 307 SERF (Science & Engineering Building)
"The Jungles of Randomness"
(An award winning journalist on topics in mathematics and computer science. You might have seen his name in "Science News", where he worked for 25 year, on one of his many popular books, such as "The Mathematical Tourist", or as online editor for the MAA's "MathTrek".)
Dr. Shashikant Mulay
Time: 3:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 25
Place: Ayres 214
"A quaint question in elementary linear algebra".
Dr. Art Benjamin ---
Time: 3:35 p.m., Friday, February 29
Place: Ayres 214
Mathematician, lightening calculator, and magician:
Drs. Doug Birdwell & Tsewei Wang
Time: 3:30 p.m., Tuesday, February 5
Place: Ayres 214
Drs. Doug Birdwell and Tsewei Wang, from Engineering, work on the national criminal DNA databases. We hear a lot about these on the news these days, so come and hear about the mathematics behind the stories.
Dr. Chuck Collins, UT - cancelled
Time: 3:30, Tuesday, January 22
Place: Ayres 214
Title: "Mathematics of the Bendy Straw". Bendy straws will be provided.
Fall 2007
Dr. Thomas Papenbrock, Physics, UT
Time: 3:30, Tuesday, November 27
Place: Ayres 214
Random matrices and chaos. There is mathematics here that you have probably seen, but it might surprise you to see how it can be used.
Dr. Robert Lang
Time: 7:00 p.m., Thursday, October 25
Place: Cox Auditorium, Alumni Memorial Building
"From Flapping Birds to Space Telescopes: The Art and Science of Origami." The free event will take place in the Alumni Memorial Building Cox Auditorium on Oct. 25 at 7 p.m. The discussion will focus on how development mathematics has been applied to the art and technique of origami throughout the past decade. Origami is the ancient Japanese art of folding paper into artistic creations.
Dr. Steve Weeks, MacArthur Fellow
Time: 7:00 p.m., Monday, October 15
Place: 201 Alumni Memorial Building
'The Shape of Space". When we look out on a clear night, the Universe seems infinite. Yet this infinity might be an illusion. During the first half of the presentation, computer games will introduce the concept of a multiconnected universal Interactive 3D graphics will then take the viewer on a tour of several possible shapes for space. Finally, we'll see how recent satellite data provide tantalizing clues to the true shape of our Universe.
Dr. Elias Wegert, Germany
Time: Tuesday, October 2
More information will be posted when available.
Dr. Remus Nicoara, UT
Time: 3:30, Tuesday, September 11
Place: Ayres 214
Google's Secret
ABSTRACT: Everybody knows that Google Inc.'s innovations in search technology made it the No. 1 search engine in the world. Google has recently made public their US patent, which reveals a great deal of how they search and rank web sites. We unveil some of the mathematics behind Google's success: graphs, matrices, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and deep results such as the Perron-Frobenius theorem.
last updated: 5/08