Junior Colloquium
The Junior Colloquium is a series of talks intended for students interested in mathematics or related subjects, started in the fall of 2002. The JC takes place roughly every other Thursday at 3:30 in the fourth floor colloquium room of Ayres Hall. The JC 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) will find information on the Tennessee Today web site or on our weekly seminar list. The archives of JC speakers, titles, and abstracts are available here.
For those interested in speaking, here are some hints about what is expected:
1. Talks should be accessible to anyone with a good understanding of basic calculus. If substantial portions of the talk require a higher level of mathematics then the necessary background should be mentioned in the abstract.
2. Ideally, talks should appeal to a wide audience, which often includes engineering and other non-math majors.
3. Faculty may give talks as often as they wish--keep your notes/slides for future use! However, the same talk may be given at most once in any two consecutive years.
4. It is OK to use a talk to advertise an area of mathematics or a career field, but the main purpose of the talk should be to to tell an interesting story about problem(s) in pure or applied mathematics.
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.
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 Carl Wagner in the Math Department for more information.
THURSDAY, APRIL 4
TIME: 3:35 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Dr. John Bowers, Univ. of Massachusetts
TITLE: Rigidity of Origami
ABSTRACT: In a seminal work on computational origami, Robert Lang proposed a design method called "TreeMaker". It produces a crease pattern for a polygonal sheet of paper such that an isometric 3D folded state exists. Though TreeMaker has been around for nearly 20 years, many of its mathematical and algorithmic properties have yet to be investigated. In this talk I will show that TreeMaker often produces crease patterns which are not rigidly foldable --- there is no continuous folding process leading to the 3D state in which the faces are kept as rigid panels whose shared edges act as hinges.
This result is joint work with Ileana Streinu.
Pizza will be available at 3:10.
THURSDAY, MARCH 14
TIME: 3:35 - 4:25 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Prof. Natalie Frank, and Chair of Mathematics, Vassar College
TITLE: Tiling: a mathematical model of crystals and quasicrystals
ABSTRACT: In 2011, Daniel Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals. This discovery, in 1982, required a rethinking of how to describe the atomic structure of highly organized solids. Fortunately, the mathematics community had been working for over a decade on the sort of tilings that have such a structure. We'll tell the story of how tilings came to be used as models for quasicrystals, and discuss some of the mathematics.
Pizza will be available at 3:10 p.m.
THURSDAY, MARCH 7
TIME: 3:35 - 4:25
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Prof. Michael Berry, Electrical & Computer Engineering
TITLE: Data Forensics on Your Social Fingerprint
ABSTRACT: A person's social fingerprint is encapsulated in Facebook activity, mobile phone connections, email exchanges, tweets, and in other avenues of electronic socialization. Using patterns extracted from such interactions, data analysts aim to identify spammers, market trends, account movements, and sentiment. Examples include the Netflix recommendation problem, targeted online advertising systems, and credit card fraud. In this talk, I will demonstrate the impact of data forensics and social fingerprinting by showcasing how one's persona can be identified by ranking the behavior between social connections. (Joint work with Denise Koessler of UTK and Chris Groer of Link Analytics.)
Pizza will be available in Ayres 405 at 3:10 p.m.
Thursday, February 21
TIME: 3:35 - 4:25
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Prof. Ken Stephenson
TITLE: Edge-Flipping for Fun and Profit
ABSTRACT: Circles have been a source of fascination and inspiration in mathematics for well over two millenia, yet they continue to surprise. The late Bill Thurston gave us the wonderful notion of "circle packing": you provide an abstract combinatorial object, and the circles spontaneously endow it with concrete geometry. We will probe this geometry in a live performance using my software "CirclePack". In particular, we study combinatorial "edge-flips" and the geometric effects. This serves both for fun and for (mathematical) profit through theory and applications. The talk will be visually based and requires no particular mathematical background.
Pizza will be available in Ayres 405 at 3:10 p.m.
Thursday, February 14
TIME: 3:35 4:40
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Prof. Suzanne Lenhart
DESCRIPTION: Video showing of new Flatland and even newer Flatland 2
Thursday, February 7
TIME: 3:35 - 4:30 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Dr. Amy Szczepanski, EECS - UT
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 served at 3:00 p.m.
Thursday, November 15
TIME: 3:35-4:30 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres Hall 405
SPEAKER: Prof. Almut Burchard, University of Toronto
TITLE: Steiner symmetrization: Some new twists in an old story
ABSTRACT: Steiner symmetrization was invented in the 1830's as a tool for proving the isoperimetric inequality, that circles enclose the largest area among all planar curves of a given length. Since then, it has found many applications in Geometry, Mathematical Physics, and
Functional Analysis.
In this talk I will describe Steiner's original argument and two recent results. The first concerns infinite sequences of Steiner symmetrizations that fail to converge to the ball, but still converge "in shape". The second bounds the perimeter of a set in R^d that has been subjected to Steiner symmetrization along d linearly independent directions. Time permitting, I will mention some open problems.
Pizza available at 3:00 p.m.
Thursday, November 8
TIME: 3:35-4:30 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres Hall 405
SPEAKER: Prof. John B. Conway, GWU
TITLE: Matrices and Topology
ABSTRACT: This talk is meant to show the interaction between linear algebra and the elementary topology of Euclidean space. It is accessible to anyone who has had a course in linear algebra and understands convergence and connectedness in finite dimensional Euclidean space. Student participation will be rewarded.
Pizza available at 3:00 p.m.
Thursday, September 20
TIME: 3:35 - 4:30 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres B004
SPEAKER: Professor Catherine Searle, Oregon State University
TITLE: Isometric Circle Actions
ABSTRACT: I will begin by describing a number of important examples of isometric actions of circles in Euclidean space and their restrictions to subspaces of Euclidean space. The goal of the talk will be to see how isometric actions of circles can be used to "recognize" the space on which they are acting.
Pizza will be available at 3:15 in 401.
Thursday, September 13
TIME: 3:35 - 4:30
ROOM: Ayres 405
SPEAKER: Professor Carla Cederbaum, Duke University
TITLE: From Newton to Einstein: a guided tour through space and time
ABSTRACT: The cosmos and its laws have fascinated people since the ancient times. Many scientists and philosophers have tried to describe and explain what they saw in the sky. And almost all of them have used mathematics to formulate their ideas and compute predictions for the future. Today, we have made huge progress in understanding and predicting how planets, stars, and galaxies behave. But still, the mysteries of our universe are formulated and resolved in mathematical language and always with new mathematical methods and ideas.
In this lecture, you will hear about two of the most famous physicists of all times, Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), and about their theories of the universe. You will learn about common features and central differences in their viewpoints and in the mathematics they used to formulate their theories. In passing, you will also encounter the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and his beautiful ideas about curvature.
Pizza will be available at 3:15 in 401.