Math 196, Student Colloquium, Winter
2019
Coordinator: Andrew Suk
Office: APM 6210
E-mail: asuk [@] ucsd [dot] edu
Time and Place:, APM 2402, Wed 1:00-1:50pm
Description: This is a weekly colloquium aimed to give students a
fun and informative introduction to various areas of mathematical
research.
Grades: There will be a sign-in sheet at each colloquium.
You may miss at most one colloquium to receive credit.
Schedule
1/9/2019: Andrew Suk
Title: Sums versus products
In this talk, I will sketch a surprising proof due to Gyorgy Elekes on a
non-trivial lower bound for the sums-versus-product problem in
combinatorial number theory.
1/16/2019: Alex Cloninger
Title: Laplacian Eigenvectors and Applications
The graph Laplacian is a simple way to summarize which nodes are connected on a graph, but it contains a lot of information in its eigendecomposition. It also can be used to
synthesize information about data points that lie in a high-dimensional space, and has connections to everything from differential geometry to image processing. We will discuss
the intuition, theory, and applications of these eigenvectors, and discuss some (as yet) unanswered questions.
1/23/2019: No seminar
1/30/2019: Mozhgan Mirzaei
Title: Colorings of integers
The famous Schur's Theorem states that for any integer k>1, there is an integer n such that for any k-coloring
of {1,...,n}, the equation x+y=z has a monochromatic solution. In this talk, we will
discuss other variations of Schur's theorem and some open problems.
2/6/2019: Brendon Rhoades
Title: Shoving boxes into corners
A partition is a way to shove a finite set of 1x1 boxes into an infinite corner. We will study enumerative problems related to partitions and describe
an
application of partitions to the geometry of the Grassmannian.
2/13/2019: Wenxin Zhou
Title: Changing the least squares
2/20/2019: No seminar
2/27/2019: Jacques Verstraete
Title: Factoring and combinatorics
3/6/2019: Tarek Elgindi
Title: Mixing
3/13/2019: Anna Ma
Title: TBD