Announcements & Schedule of Events for
Spring 2008
The spring, 2008 semester was full of extracurricular events sponsored by the mathematics department. Several of these events are featured below.
Student Club Meetings:
Mathematical Association of America Club Meetings (MAA):
Anyone interested in mathematics is invited to attend the MAA meetings. Lunch is provided and a short talk is presented. All of the meetings are held from Noon Until 12:50 pm in MCS 211. The meetings schedule is as follows:
- Feb 1: Generating functions are power series formed with a sequence of numbers. These functions can sometimes be used to find an exact formula for the sequence. We formed generating functions for several sequences and manipulated them to get an exact formula. Knowledge of partial fractions and power series was essential.
- Feb 29: Dr. Charles Diminnie was the guest speaker. His talk was a continuation of the topic of finding closed form expressions for recursively defined sequences. If the recursive definition for a sequence is of a particular form, the method of linear difference equations presents a relatively simple way to recover a formula for the sequence. The elementary theory was discussed and some well-known examples were worked out.
- March 3: Sloane Springer graduated from ASU with a math degree. Last fall, she entered an electrical engineering graduate program at Texas Tech. She gave her first-hand experience about how you can leap from math to engineering.
- Apr 11: We showed the DVD animation Flatland: A Journey of Many Dimensions which is
based on Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Flatland is a world that exists entirely on a two-dimensional plane. All different kinds of shapes live, work, and play in this world.
Mathematics Teachers of Tomorrow Club Meetings (MT2):
Any student who is interest in teaching mathematics is invited to attend the MT2 meetings. Lunch is provided and a short talk is presented. All of the meetings are held from Noon Until 12:50 pm in MCS 211. The meetings schedule is as follows:
- Feb 13: Mrs. Barnard, Mrs. Moreland, and Mrs. Talley introduced us to the three journals available from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). These journals are great resources for challenging problems, group projects, and articles about teaching.
- Mar 14: In celebration of Pi Day, Mrs. Talley and Dr. Smith presented several topics related to Pi. They relayed that Daniel Tammet holds the European record for reciting Pi from memory to 22,514 digits in just over five hours, and demonstrated several Monte Carlo methods for generating Pi.
- Apr 23: Dr. Huckaby gave in interactive talk on circles.
Pi Mu Epsilon Mathematics Honor Society:
The society exists to recognize students that have achieved academic distinction in the field of mathematics.
- April 7: The Pi Mu Epsilon honor society dinner and induction ceremony was held at the ASU lakehouse. Dr. Swets presented a brief history of the efforts to develop simple formulas that generate the roots of polynomials and of the men involved in this effort.
Slow Pitch Mathematics Seminar:
The Slowpitch seminars are designed to acquaint mathematical students with topics of interest to various faculty members. The talks are sponsored by the Angelo State MAA Student Chapter, the Texas Zeta Chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon and the Angelo State University Mathematics Department.
- Feb 8: Dr. Trey Smith presented the following topic: In the late 1800s and early 1900s, mathematicians made a valiant attempt to axiomatize all of mathematics. Along the way they discovered a few problems that would turn out to be fatal to their program. One of these was the axiom of choice. In this talk, we will discuss this axiom and some remarkable historical parallels with some other troubling axioms.
- Feb 29: Ms. Halley Newman presented the following topic: Benoit Mandelbrot once said, “Coastline length turns out to be an elusive notion that slips between the fingers of one who wants to grasp it.” Ms. Newman presented an algorithm that uses probability to provide an estimate for such lengths. This talk is part of her Carr research project and was presented to the Texas Academy of Sciences.
- March 7: Robert Seletsky presented the following topic: Cryptography is the science of converting information to a disguised form and has important applications in everyday life. The Basic Cryptographic Algorithms of a "Substitution Cipher" and an "Affine Cipher" will be discussed.
- April 18: Dr. Siefker presented the following topic: Mathematicians often search for different ways of representing the same function. One reason for doing this is that each representation is more useful than the others in solving certain problems. For example, a polynomial may be expressed in general or factored form. The y-intercept is easily obtained from the general form while the x-intercepts are obvious when a polynomial is factored. In 1916, Fejer showed that certain “nice” polynomials formed using sines and cosines (called trigonometric polynomials) could be “factored”. This talk presents a theorem which extends Fejer’s result to less “nice” trigonometric polynomials.
- April 25: Dr Huckaby presented the following topic: Many problems are most naturally represented by data in a high-dimensional space. The singular value decomposition (SVD) is a matrix factorization that reveals the structure of the data and allows one to drastically reduce the dimension of the problem. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) refers to representing text (such as book chapters or web pages) in high-dimensional space and then reducing the dimension to reveal structure and meaning that were not apparent before. In this presentation, we will get a feel for the SVD and then see how it can be used in one application area of LSI, namely search engines.
Mobius Strip Competition:
The Mobius Strip Competition was held on November 16, 2007 in MCS 211. We had lunch, listened to an entertaining reading by Dr. Trey Smith, and judged the entries. First place was awarded to Dr. Dionne Bailey, and best of show went to Lacy Moore.
Other Events:
Mathematics Webcast: To Infinity and BeyondThe link to the Lecture Series website, where the details of the lecture and the webcast could be found, is:
http://www.esi.utexas.edu/outreach/ols/lectures/Starbird/