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) 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, 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 Conrad Plaut in the Math Department for more information.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
SPEAKER: Dr. Amy Szczepanski, UT, EECS
TIME: 3:35
ROOM: Ayres 405
TITLE: Understanding the Encoding of the JPEG Images
ABSTRACT: JPEG encoding allows large images to be represented as fairly small files. This compression is achieved through clever use of algorithms that take advantage of the fact that pixel intensity and color both tend to change fairly gradually throughout an image.
We'll see how this property, together with well-chosen matrices and smart ways of representing long strings of zeros, allows the JPEG format to encode images efficiently. This talk should be accessible to anyone who is comfortable with matrix multiplication.
Pizza will be available at 3:15 pm.
Thursday, November 17
SPEAKER: Prof. Remus Nicoara
TIME: 3:35
ROOM: Ayres 405
TITLE: 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 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. We will also discuss other search tools such as Bing, WolframAlpha, and Siri.
Pizza will be available at 3:15 pm.
Thursday, November 10
SPEAKER: Prof. Ben Cooper
TIME: 3:35 – 4:25
ROOM: Ayres 405
TITLE: "Using math to get along with your roommates"
ABSTRACT: We answer the question of whether it is always possible to share fairly with your fellow roommates in the affirmative.
Pizza will be available at 3:15 p.m.
Thursday, October 27
SPEAKER: Professor K. Sundar, LSU
TIME: 3:35 – 4:25 p.m.
ROOM: Ayres B003
TITLE: "Probability and PDEs"
ABSTRACT: The use of probability theory to answer purely deterministic questions would, at first sight, seem paradoxical and surprising.
Starting from the basics, probabilistic reasoning will be employed in this talk to solve the Dirichlet problem and the heat equation. Extensions and applications will be briefly discussed.
Please join us for pizza at 3:15 p.m.
Thursday, September 15
SPEAKER: Professor Jin Feng-University of Kansas
TIME: 3:30 – 5:00pm
ROOM: Ayres 405
TITLE: Entropy, from the point of view of Boltzmann
ABSTRACT: The concept of entropy has been used in many physical contexts. In this talk, I will focus on and explain the original version as was devised by Boltzmann, to describe symmetry of particles in gas kinetics. The whole concept can be derived by using elementary calculations based upon combinatorial counting techniques and an asymptotic formula known as Sterling formula. The modern day version of what we will derive is known as Sanov theorem in the Theory of Large Deviations
Thursday, September 8
SPEAKER: Dr. Bill Holmes, Univ of British Columbia, Alumnus of UT
TIME: 3:35 pm
ROOM: Fourth Floor Colloquium Room, Ayres Hall
TITLE: Foundations of wave propagation in biology and ecology.