Math Club - Spring 2019 Events
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Patently Mathematical, Or How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time
Speaker: Associate Professor Jeff Suzuki
12:30-2 p.m., 1105 Ingersoll Hall
The Math Club hosted a talk given by Associate Professor Jeff Suzuki based on his new book, Patently Mathematical, Or How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time. For more information on the talk, see the abstract below. Kosher pizza and refreshments were served.
Abstract: Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. But the garage workshop, with the lone genius struggling to create a device that will change the world, is mostly a thing of the past. Today, building a better mousetrap requires the resources of an industrial giant and a laboratory with hundreds or even thousands of researchers. Inventions based on mathematics are the exception, for mathematical invention requires nothing more costly than a notebook and pencil. And while you cannot patent a mathematical formula, you can patent a device that uses a mathematical formula. In some cases, the mathematics is dauntingly complex, but in a surprising number of cases, the mathematics is so very elementary that any mathematics student could have secured the patent. We will take a look at the mathematics behind some recent patents, in fields ranging from web services, to online dating, to career advising. Along the way, we will confront an important problem: Patents are issued for devices, not for how the device is used. But the heart and soul of mathematics is its generalizability, so issuing a patent based on a mathematical formula risks giving the patent holder a stranglehold on every industry: Google could demand royalties from eHarmony, or IBM could try to obtain a cease and desist order against the NSA. We will close with some thoughts on how to improve the patent system's approach to mathematical inventions.
Thursday, April 11
The Geometric Approach to Fluid Mechanics
Speaker: Professor Stephen Preston
12:30-2 p.m., 1141 Ingersoll Hall
Professor Stephen Preston gave a talk on "The Geometric Approach To Fluid Mechanics." For more information, see the abstract below. Kosher pizza and drinks were served.
Abstract: On a curved surface, the shortest path between two points is not a line but rather a curve called a geodesic. The Gaussian curvature of a surface is a function on the surface that describes to what extent the surface looks like a sphere (positive curvature) or a hyperbolic saddle (negative curvature). Under positive curvature, geodesics may spread apart but eventually come together, while under negative curvature they diverge exponentially. The same ideas extend to higher dimensions and even infinitely many dimensions. In 1966 Vladimir Arnold showed how to write the Euler equations for a perfect fluid (no viscosity, incompressible, no external forces) as a geodesic equation in an infinite-dimensional manifold. He then computed some curvatures and showed that they tended to be negative, which can be viewed as an explanation of why weather prediction is hard. I will discuss the basics of differential geometry and how some of this works for fluids.
Tuesday, March 19
Choosing a Career With a Math Degree
12:30-2 p.m., 1146 Ingersoll Hall
The Math Department along with the Math Club hosted this event. This discussion was conducted by Pearce Washabaugh, who received his Ph.D. in math with Professor Stephen Preston. Washabaugh is now working as a senior data scientist at TrueFit. For more information about the talk, see the abstract below. Pizza and refreshments were served.
Abstract: It is not uncommon for mathematics students of all levels to have anxiety about finding a job. However, businesses desperately need people that can take in a large number of details to frame a problem, abstract away unnecessary details to get to the heart of a problem, and combine the tools and data at hand to arrive at a solution. You will note that these are precisely the skills that mathematics students are taught. In this talk, we will work on closing the gap between school and business. We will discuss my path from math student to data scientist, as well as the advice I got and lessons I have learned about getting a job in general.
Thursday, March 14
Pi Day Celebration
12:30-2 p.m., 1146 Ingersoll Hall
Pi Day is March 14, 2019. The Math Department and the Math Club hosted a Pi Day celebration. At 12:30 p.m. free pizza was served. Then at 12:45 p.m., an integration bee took place (this was a tournament style competition where two people try and solve an integral in a timed race). The winner of this tournament received a $50 Amazon gift card and the runner-up got the book 17 Equations That Changed The World, by Ian Stewart. After the competition, Assistant Professor Diana Hubbard gave a talk on how you can find Pi using just a spreadsheet and the Pythagorean Theorem. At around 2 p.m., dessert pies were served. For those who attended, this was a fun day of math and pies.
Tuesday, March 5
What is Moduli Space?
Speaker: Chaya Norton (University of Montreal)
12:30–2 p.m., 1105 Ingersoll Hall
This was the Math Club's first colloquium of the semester. Chaya Norton (Concordia University) gave a talk on "What is a moduli space?" The abstract for this talk is below. Pizza and refreshments were served.
Abstract: Consider the collection of triangles in the Euclidean plane up to congruence. Three non-collinear points in the plane determines a unique triangle containing these points as its vertices. The classification problem is to understand which collection of points give rise to equivalent triangles. A moduli space is a geometric "space," which describes the solution to a geometric classification problem. The property of solving a geometric classification problem implies that points in the moduli space correspond to unique objects considered up to the equivalence. More importantly mathematicians would like the moduli space to be equipped with a geometry which describes how the objects vary, namely nearby points correspond to objects which are small variations of each other. We will consider the simple moduli problem of equivalent triangles in order to demonstrate the notion of a moduli space and basic questions one may ask about the space constructed, as well as the complications that arise from automorphisms of the objects.
