Date	Speaker	Title
August 24	Shane Passon and Jordan Schettler	Organizational Meeting
We're seeking out speakers for this year's Graduate Student Colloquium.
August 31	Jordan Schettler	Slumdog Millionaire
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who at times lived in poverty and, as paper was scarce, only recorded his final calculations. He filled up four 'notebooks' with line after line of results which launched whole new areas of math along with the careers of those who tried to verify the beautiful identities they found. We'll give a brief account of Ramanujan's life and of selected results.
September 7	Victor Piercey	Adventures in Calculus
I will present several experiments that I conducted while teaching our own Math 124 in 23 days this summer. I will discuss which were successes, which were failures, and which didn't work but still have potential. Faculty, applied math students, undergraduates, and anybody else who is interested is encouraged to attend.
September 14	Yaron Hadad	Gravitational solitons
In 1978 Belinskii and Zakharov developed a method (the Inverse Scattering Transform) for generating new solutions of Einstein's field equation from known solutions. These new solutions are gravitational solitons, namely, gravitational waves of the space continuum that are localized and maintain their shape even after interacting with other solitons. The method reveals a beautiful connection between the singularities of certain complex valued functions and the physical properties of the gravitational waves. The talk will include a short introduction to Einstein's general relativity, followed by a discussion of the method. If time allows, I will demonstrate a new solution we recently obtained for the Einstein equation. No knowledge in physics is required. The talk will be math oriented, and will only assume basic complex analysis, calculus and linear algebra. In fact, if you don't understand a single word I wrote in the abstract, you should understand them after the talk. This is a good opportunity to see one of the most profound results obtained by one of our faculty members.
September 21	Lee Schick	A Simple Spectral Counterexample
The spectra of operators, such as Hamiltonian operators in quantum mechanics, are in general difficult to find explicitly. Fortunately, for many problems there is no need to look at the whole spectrum and one can simply use certain trace invariants to solve these problems or find approximate solutions. However, these invariants do not retain all of the information about the spectrum. In this talk, I will present two semiclassical Schrodinger operators based on the 1D harmonic oscillator which have all of the same trace invariants, but do not have the same spectrum. No background in quantum mechanics is needed, nor is an understanding of the vocabulary used here, as the physical and spectral theory terms used here well be defined in the talk. In addition, the only math required to understand the result is calculus. Come and see some of the newest research in spectral theory, and, if there is time, some open questions raised by this result.
September 28	Martin Leslie	Entropy and Huffman Codes
Information theory was invented by Claude Shannon in 1948 and gives us fundamental limits on how we can store and communicate data. This talk will be an introduction to two basic ideas in the field. Entropy is a number which quantifies the amount of uncertainty involved in predicting a random variable. Huffman coding is a method of lossless data compression which is optimal in some sense to be revealed in the talk. So come along and see a fundamental limit of how we can store data and then a clever idea that tells us how to get as close to that limit as possible. I won't use any mathematical tools beyond precalculus but I will prove a few small facts. Hopefully you will enjoy the proofs as much as I do.
October 5	Michael Bishop	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
October 12	TBD	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
October 19	Aaron Wooten	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
Oct 26	TBD	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
November 2	Jordan Schettler and Victor Piercey	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
November 9	TBD	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
November 16	Mandi Schaeffer	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
November 23	Angel Chavez	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
November 30	Dylan Murphy	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined
December 7	TBD	Title To be determined
Abstract to be determined

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