All Math Club meetings and talks are held in REC 113 at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, unless otherwise noted. Stay tuned for upcoming events in Spring 2013!
How To Use Free Software To Find Probable Primes With Over 10,000 Digits
March 21, 2013
You Can Use Your CPU Downtime To Find A Probable Prime In About 3 Days. Matt Stath will demonstrate with free software how to make The Top 5000 Primes List and The Probable Primes List. Formulas will be included. This will include gigantic primes of over 10,000 digits, arithmetic progressions of primes, The Repunit Project, and more!
MAA Fall Sectional Meeting Oct 27th, 2012To see all the information, please go to http://sections.maa.org/indiana/.
The Virginia Tech Regional Mathematics Competition (VTRMC) Oct 27th, 2012The Virginia Tech Regional Mathematics Contest is sponsored each fall by the Mathematics Department at Virginia Tech. More than 130 colleges and universities throughout VA, DC, GA, IL, MD, NJ, NY, OH, NC, PA, SC, TN, WV and other states are invited to participate each year. Now approaching its 34th year, the contest began in 1979 and has grown to the point where over 50 schools with over 300 contestants participate in a typical year. Contestants at each participating school take the two and one-half hour exam on their own campus under the supervision of one of their own faculty members. Individuals compete for $750 in regional prizes for which any contestant is eligible, and $250 in local prizes for which only Virginia Tech students are eligible. Initially conceived as a regional preliminary contest to the annual national William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition, the VTRMC still serves that function at a number of participating schools. Contest results are made available in time to modify your Putnam team composition, if desired.
Arithmetic Progressions of Perfect Squares Steve O MussmannOct 4th, 2012An arithmetic progression is a sequence of numbers with a common difference. How many terms can we include if each term must be a perfect square? What if we use the rational numbers? What if we allow some square roots to be adjoined? I will be discussing and presenting some results learned and discovered this past summer in a Research Experience for Undergraduates.
Math Talk Sept 20th, 2012For this week's meeting, we'll talk math discussing some interesting anecdotes, problems and games. From past experience, it is a lot more fun when you come up with some cool math problems and challenge the rest of the club. So, put your questioning (& thinking) hats on!
Proof Without Words Sept 13th, 2012Our first event is the inaugural edition of 'The B'Euler Quiz'. It's a math quiz with no numbers (yes, that's right!). The format is kept a surprise! So, join us this Thursday (Sep 13) 6:00 PM at REC 108 to play and win the title of 'Master B'Euler 2012' and some interesting prizes.
What's a data algebra and how do you build one? Dr. Gary Sherman April 19th, 2012Ask n people the question "What's data?" and the cardinality of the set of responses is better approximated by n than by one. Any self respecting mathematician is puzzled by this --- denizens of data-world, not so much. Indeed, ever since E. F. Codd's 1970 paper, A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks (Comm. ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp. 377-387) gave rise to the Relational Data Model (RDM), the data-world's solution to this congenital ambiguity has been to exacerbate it by conflating the data, whatever it is, with some prejudicial visual artifice (tables in the case of the RDM); i.e., by confusing the message with the paper it's written on --- so to speak. What is worse, each new artifice comes equipped with a brief, supposedly-mathematical incantation to justify the trip down a new rabbit hole. This talk discusses Algebraic Data Corporation's approach to knowing data in the context of Zemelo-Frankel set theory, the foundation for all modern mathematics and, therefore, the only legitimate incantation to use when invoking the good name of mathematics. Indeed, our incantation births a rigorous notion of data algebra in plain sight of the RDM and its mongrel spawn, Structured Query Language (SQL).
Euler Integration and Applications April 12th, 2012Euler characteristic is much more than a number associated with polyhedra–it is a topological invariant that we can extend to an integration theory. I will give an introduction to integration with respect to Euler characteristic. This integration theory has intriguing applications to topological enumeration problems, especially in the context of sensor networks. I will also touch on some current research.
Quantitative problems in topology and group theory Dr. McReynolds March 22nd, 2012Often when solving problems or writing programs, we first find a solution without any thought on whether or not our solution is effective. A beautiful example of this is the first upper bound of the nth Ramsey number given by Ramsey; the upper bound was nested powers of n!. I will discuss some general topological and algebraic problems that we would like to solve effectively. For instance, once you know a topological space is Hausdorff, how effectively can you separate points? In a residually finite group, how effectively can you decide a given element is non-trivial? I will explore both of these problems on the integers. We will effective solve these problems there and also study how effectively we can solve these problems on average (similar to a rule of thumb rule time for a code). If you know modular arithmetic and infinite series, you will be able to follow most of this talk.
Pi Minus Epsilon Day March 8th, 2012We'll bring everything you'd expect out of a holiday's approximation. First and foremost the traditional dish: pie! Of course what's a math club meeting without math information so in addition to a delicious pie we'll have delicious, strange and interesting facts about pi (including connections to number theory, topology and analysis). So if you love pie or pi; radii or tori; or simply -i*ln(-1) come in and join in the fun!