Thursday, September 17: Speaker: Professor Willard Miller and Li Lin,

Title: Compressive sampling or how to get something from nothing

Thursday, September 24: Speaker: Professor Marta Lewicka
Title: Morphogenesis in soft growing tissues -- how leaves and flowers grow and how to do math about it

Thursday, October 1: Speaker: Professor Peter Webb
Title: The Beauty of Groups and Symmetry

Thursday, October 8: Speaker: Dr. Rebecca Schmitz
Title: TBA

Something about operator algebras, I think!

Thursday, October 15: Speaker: John Baxter
Title: TBA

Thursday, October 22: Speaker: TBA
Title: TBA

Thursday, October 29: Speaker: Dr. Justin Sukiennik
Title: In Search of Transcendental Numbers

Abstract: We will briefly look at the historical perspective behind the definition of transcendental numbers leading up to nineteenth century. Then we will prove Joseph Liouville's Theorem on algebraic numbers, which will demonstrate to us that transcendental numbers exist (without using a countable argument). Finally, we will look at some familiar looking numbers which are unknown to be algebraic or transcendental.

Thursday, November 5: Speaker: Professor Brian Mosher
Title: Fellow travelers: road trips in Cayley graphs

If the Cayley graph of a group has a structure that can be described recursively, then paths in the graph enjoy the fellow traveler property: roughly, two paths that start and end near each other must stay near each other along the way. I hope to give an accessible introduction to combinatorial group theory and the automata theory that describes the structure of the Cayley graph.

Thursday, November 12: Speaker: Jeff Weeks
Title: Visual Introduction to Hyperbolic Geometry

Physical models along with 2- and 3-dimensional software simulations introduce students to spherical and hyperbolic geometry.

Thursday, November 19: Speaker: Dr. Yuriko Renardy
Title: Collaborative research on a treatment for retinal detachment

Thursday, December 3: Speaker: Professor Maury Bramson
Title: TBA