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From the Angels and Devils game to the control of wildfires
Can the apocalyptic battle between angels and devils offer ideas for the confinement of Canadian wildfires?
In this Math Club, we will discuss a combinatorial game theoretical problem proposed by John Horton Conway and commonly referred to as the Angels and Devils game.
Then we will investigate a variational problem for differential inclusions, motivated by the control of forest fires,
and show how these two problems are connected.
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Welcome to the Math Club home page!
The math club meets once a week in the Winter term, on Thursday evenings for about an hour. It is intended for anyone interested in mathematics, whether they are a math major or not.
At each meeting a speaker will discuss an interesting idea in mathematics. We try to pick topics that can be understood without much background. An ideal topic is one which starts with something simple, and by exploring its twists and turns, leads to something unexpectedly deeper.
The goal is to show mathematics the way that mathematicians see it: a living subject full of deep and intertwining ideas, growing naturally out of our desire to understand the fundamental concepts of space and number.
| Date | Topic | Speaker | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan. | 25 | The century of elliptic curves | M. Ram Murty | ||
| Feb. | 1 | Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum | David Wehlau | ||
| 8 | Bifoliations of the plane from bifoliations of the circle | Thomas Barthelmé | |||
| 15 | What is the average area of the shadow of a cube? | Mike Roth | |||
| 29 | Proof of the sensitivity conjecture | Ivan Dimitrov | |||
| Mar. | 7 | Stein's Paradox, Lemma, and Method | Yanglei Song | ||
| 14 | Up and down and down and up | Jamie Mingo | |||
| 21 | CANSSI Distinguished Lecture | Xiao-Li Meng (Harvard) | |||
| 28 | Concentration of measure on the sphere | Francesco Cellarosi | |||
| Apr. | 4 | From the Angels and Devils game to the control of wildfires | Teresa Chiri |
The meetings are Thursdays in Jeff 118 from 17:30–18:30.
To suggest a topic for the Math Club, or to find out further information, please email Ivan Dimitrov, Mike Roth, or Greg Smith .
| Web Site of the Week |
| Check out Quanta Magazine; an online science magazine specializing in Mathematics, Physics, and the Life Sciences. |
| Winter 2024 |
| Queen's University |
| Kingston, Ontario |