Fall 2021
Tuesdays, 4:35-5:35 PM, JWB 335 and Online (Zoom)
MATH 6960-001
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| 31 August | Academic Jobs Panel | |
| 7 September | Speaker: Peter McDonald | Snacks: Keshav Patel On Expressing Numbers: Decimals vs. Continued Fractions How do you write down a number? For some numbers, we have convenient, compact ways of writing them (think 1/2, the square root of 2, pi) but for your average, run-of-the-mill number,you’d probably end up writing down part of its decimal expansion. But what if I told you there was a better way? In this (short) talk, we’ll introduce an alternative - continued fractions - and talk about why they’re better than the decimal expansion of real numbers. |
| 14 September | Speaker: Alex Beams | Snacks: George Domat Slide Roulette: When you want to talk about anything at all Picture this: you're at a conference, and you have to give a talk, but for some reason you are woefully unprepared. Maybe your laptop got stolen, or run over by a train, you're just lazy, or you like improv. Whatever the reason, you do not have any slides, and you're feeling reckless. What do you do? One tried-and-true method (for GSAC, anyway) is to ask volunteers in the audience to make slides, have somebody else shuffle them all in a random order, and then give a talk on the fly. So that's the format for this talk: each slide in my deck will be made by one of you, I'll not have seen it beforehand, and we'll see how it goes. Feel free to make a slide and send it to Trent DeGiovanni who has generously agreed to be my slide deck shuffler. We still need slides. |
| 21 September | Speaker: Rahul Ghosh | Snacks: Daniel Hallman Lurie's Categorification of Fourier Transform: How I Learned to stop differentiating and love categorifying. In this talk, I'll try to explain basic ideas from Jacob Lurie's Harvard Lecture on the above title (and/or Breakthrough Prize Lecture-52) mixed with my unique blend of crucial misunderstandings in 45 minutes. I'll start from usual Fourier Transform and keep on complicating it till I reach the Geometric Langlands Program. I make no claim for originality. In particular, all credits goes to Dr. Lurie whereas, all mistakes are of course my responsibility. |
| 28 September | Speaker: Eric Brown | Snacks: Anil Cengiz Come with me and you'll be in a world of strange and different radix Let's explore why writing numbers in base 10 is not so great and talk about other number bases which are often used, such as binary, dozenal, sexagesimal and more. But what about numbers with non-integral radices? We will delve into those as well! |
| 6 October (Note different date and time) | Speaker: Jennifer Balakrishnan (BU) | AWM-RTG Career Path Talk, 10:00 AM |
| 19 October | Speaker: Jack Cook | Snacks: Madison Delmoe |
| 27 October (Note different date and time) | Speaker: Deanna Needell (UCLA) | AWM Career Path Talk, 4:30 PM |
| 2 November | Speaker: Daniel McCormick | Snacks: Rebecca Hardenbrook |
| 9 November | Speaker: Samantha Linn | Snacks: Tess Sheets |
| 16 November | Speaker: Rebecca Hardenbrook | Snacks: Daniel McCormick |
| 23 November | Speaker: Jose Yanez | Snacks: Sanghoon Kwak Negative Continued Fractions In this talk I will introduce Hirzebruch-Jung continued fractions, sometimes referred to as negative continued fractions. I will state some properties of these fractions and explain how they are related to combinatorics, cyclic group actions, and algebraic geometry. If time permits (which is usually not the case) I'll show connections between negative continued fractions, ramified covers, and Dedekind sums. |