What is the Math Club?
The Math Club holds talks on interesting topics in mathematics. All students are welcome; little math background is needed. Meetings are Tuesdays at 5:00pm in Cupples I 199. Talks are about 45 minutes long and are usually given by Wash. U. faculty and graduate students. Free pizza and drinks are always provided!
Fall 2009 Calendar
- September 8: Movie Stand and Deliver.
- September 22: Mathematician + Modulo Arithmetic = Mathemagician, Jasmine Ng
Magicians perform various numerical illusions whose secrets have eluded audiences...until now. We will journey into the world of modulo n and explore several "magical" number tricks, which are actually "modulo" number tricks. Moreover, we will see how to derive countless tricks from the same modulo arithmetic fact about the integer 9, and, thus, become a mathemagician in 45 minutes or less!
- October 13 (talk starts at 4:30pm): Fractals by
Iterative Affine Transformations, Tao Ju
Fractals are intriguing shapes that are common in nature and well-studied in geometry. We will explore a class of fractals that are generated by simple linear algebra - matrix multiplications. The interactive lecture will feature many hands-on computer experiments, and will end with some open questions that challenge your math skills!
- October 27: Seven Shuffles is Sufficient, Scott Cook
How many times do you need to shuffle a standard deck of 52 playing cards for the deck to be really random? If you reflexively answered "seven", you may be surprised that this universally known "fact" is only 20 years old and came as a sufficiently great surprise so as to merit an article on the front page of the New York Times science section. Equally surprising is the stunning simplicity of the argument...once you see the right place to start.
- November 10: Electricity Pricing and Convexity, Brian Maurizi
We are familiar with the ideas of a supply curve, a demand curve, and a market clearing price. However, there are situations where such a price does not exist. Furthermore, such a situation is in fact an everyday occurence: The generation of electric power in a deregulated market. The nonexistance of a market clearing price is due to basic physical constraints of power plants, so something else must be found. Something has been found, and it involves interesting connections to convexity theory.
- November 17: Speculations on the shape of the universe, Rajan Mehta
A long time ago, people thought the Earth was flat. This inevitably led them to one of two conclusions--either it extended infinitely in all directions, or it had edges that you could fall off of. The advent of the round-Earth theory was remarkable in that, besides being correct, it described a world that was finite but without edges. If you're like most people, you conceive of the universe as being "flat" in a sense, either extending infinitely in all directions or with a boundary that is somehow impassable. However, it's mathematically possible for the universe, like the Earth, to be finite but without edges. I'll discuss some possibilities for what such a universe could look like.
More events to come!
Get involved!
Find out about events at this page or by joining our Facebook group.
For more information, contact the Math Club President, Shubho Sadhu (
) or the Math Club faculty advisor, Professor Raj Mehta (
).