Math Club

– This Week –
Skiing like a Mathematician What kinds of questions would a mathematician ask while skiing? Is there a safe downhill trajectory which allows me to avoid other skiers? Is there an optimal path? How can I balance optimality and safety? We will decode these questions through Lipschitz functions, control problems, and regularization techniques.

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.	23	The $2$-adic logarithm	M. Ram Murty
	30	Domino Tilings	Gregory G. Smith
Feb.	6	Pseudorandom number generation and the NSA backdoor	Mike Roth
	13	Conway's Winning Ways	Jamie Mingo
	27	Kuratowski's closure-complement problem	Ivan Dimitrov
Mar.	6	Left orders on Groups	Thomas Barthelmé
	13	Ultrafilters and Ramsey Theory	Francesco Cellarosi
	20	Compressed Sensing	Yanglei Song
	27	The Permanent (200^th Math Club talk!)	Bahman Gharesifard
Apr.	3	Skiing like a Mathematician	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.

Math Club

– This Week –