Upcoming Events:

All Math Club meetings and talks are held in REC 108 at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, unless otherwise noted. Stay tuned for upcoming events in spring 2012!

This week:

Title: Taylor Series
When: Jan26th at 6:00 p.m.
Where: REC 113

Fall 2011 Events:

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Speaker: Eric C Haengel
Title: Group theory and the Rubik's cube.
When: Oct 6th at 6:00 p.m.
Where: REC 108

ABSTRACT:Group theory and the Rubik's cube. The presenter has learned how group theory can be applied to solve the Rubik's cube, and he also has read some papers about how researchers managed to prove that the 3x3 cube can always be solved in 20 moves or less.

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Title: Social Meeting
When: Sept 29th at 6:00 p.m.
Where: REC 108

ABSTRACT:Board games (Chess, Go!) and card games (Set) and any other nerdy games you guys want to include feel free to bring. If you have interesting math problems (or logic problems, or whatever) you found/thought of, feel free to bring them in to entertain and possibly frustrate us.

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Speaker: Professor Randy Qian
Title: Microlocal analysis and partial differential equations
When: Sept 22nd at 6:00 p.m.
Where: REC 108

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Speaker: Jennifer Beineke and Lowell Beineke
Title: "Splendor in the Graphs"
When: Sept 15th at 6:00 p.m.
Where: REC 108

ABSTRACT:Graph theory can provide an entertaining analysis of certain games and puzzles. Using elementary results, we will explore brainteasers such as
Dots-and-Boxes, Bridg-It, Paradoxical Pennies, and Perplexing Prisoners. That
should be preparation enough to set us off on a mathematical sort of
safari.

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Speaker: Prof. Edray Goins
Title: An Introduction to Dessins d'Enfants: The Intersection of Graph Theory, Group Theory, and Differential Geometry
When: Sept 8th at 6:00 p.m.
Where: REC 108

ABSTRACT: Suppose there are three cottages, and each needs to be connected to the gas, water, and electric companies. Using a third dimension or sending any of the connections through another company or cottage are disallowed. Is there a way to make all nine connections without any of the lines crossing each other? To answer such a question, we explore the properties of planar graphs. It is natural to generalize to graphs which can be embedded into Riemann surfaces, such as the sphere and the torus. In this talk, we discuss how to draw such graphs using Grothendieck's concept of a Dessin d'Enfant. This is based on joint research with Anika Rounds through the Zoltners Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

(For some of us this might be a complex picture so he has provided a link to get a visual idea of what is going on http://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/twentysix.html)

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Title: Math Club Call out
When: September 1st at 6:00pm
Where: REC 108

2009-2010 Events:

2008-2009 Events:

2006-2007 Events:

Speaker: Prof. Robert Zink
Title: Tiling a Rectangle
When: Thursday, 9/21/2006, 7:00 p.m.
Where: UNIV 303


Speaker: Prof. Steve Bell
Title: Mathematics and Graduate School
When: Thursday, 9/28/2006, 7:00 p.m.
Where: UNIV 303


Speaker: Prof. Burgess Davis
Title: Random walks and heat conduction
Abstract: A random walker jumps from an integer k to another integer by tossing a coin and if the coin is ads jumping to k+1 and if the coin is tails jumping to k-1. Then the coin is tossed again another jump is made and so on forever. I will show how such walks are used to study heat conduction.
When: Thursday, 10/5/2006, 7:00 p.m.
Where: UNIV 303