Hello math/stats colloquium people – welcome back!

The first month or so of the Spring 2016 colloquium will consist of a series of talks by candidates for faculty positions at SJSU, to start in Fall 2016.  Below are the job talks scheduled so far, along with a general description of their topic areas; for more details, see the physical flyers that will be posted around MacQuarrie Hall the morning of each talk.  Talks are all in MacQuarrie Hall 320; Mon-Thu talks are at 3:00pm, and Fri talks are at 10:30am.

Your opinion of these talks and candidates is valuable, so please feel free to share it with hiring committee chairs Slobodan Simic (numerical analysis, applied discrete math), slobodan.simic@sjsu.edu, and Steve Crunk (statistics), steven.crunk@sjsu.edu.

Hope to see you there!

• Thu Jan 28: Numerical analysis (mathematical electrodynamics)
  MH320, 3:00pm
• Fri Jan 29: Applied discrete math (graph theory)
  MH320, 10:30am

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• Mon Feb 01: Statistics (stochastic processes)
  MH320, 3:00pm
• Tue Feb 02: Applied discrete math
• Wed Feb 03: Numerical analysis
• Thu Feb 04: Applied discrete math
• Fri Feb 05: Numerical analysis
  

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• Mon Feb 08: Applied discrete math
• Tue Feb 09: Statistics
  

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• Mon Feb 15: Statistics
• Wed Feb 17: Statistics

The Math/Stats Colloquium is excited to have, as its last talk of the fall semester, Nic Brummell (UC Santa Cruz) on “The Mathematics of the Sun”.  These days, thanks to spacecraft technology, we can observe the Sun with amazing detail, and yet we understand very little about how it works.  As usual, mathematical models make a great laboratory for playing with some ideas, and these have provided some great insight into this mysterious object.  And yet, even with massive supercomputers at our disposal, we are still very confused as to what is going on.  We will explore this dilemma in this talk.

Background: This talk should be accessible to all.  Some equations will be shown, but, never fear, the mysterious symbols will be translated into easy-to-understand physical phenomena.  Lower-division students interested in what math is good for are especially encouraged to attend!

Note: Prof. Brummell is also here to recruit applications for the doctoral program in applied mathematics and statistics at UC Santa Cruz, and he and Dr. Gross will be having coffee with students afterwards to discuss that program.  Please notify any students you think might be interested.

• Date: Wed Nov 18
• Time: 3-3:50pm
• Room: MH320
• Snacks: 2:30pm in MH331B

For more information, click here to see the full flyer, suitable for printing and posting.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming events: Due to various accidents of the calendar, this will be the final math/stats colloquium of the fall.  See you in the spring!

Click here to go to the Math/Stats Colloquium page.

The Math/Stats Colloquium is excited to present Ethan Berkove (Lafayette College) to talk about “Solving the Color Cubes Puzzle”.  Given a palette of colors, a color cube is one where each face is colored with exactly one color and all colors in the palette appear on some face.  For example, there are 30 distinct 6-color cubes.  In the Colored Cubes Puzzle, you are given a large set of color cubes.  To solve the puzzle you need to arrange a subset of the collection into an n x n x n cube where each face is a single color.  (Think: broken Rubik’s Cube.)  In this talk we will describe progress on this puzzle for a number of different sized palettes.  Most of the results are the result of work with undergraduates, and we’ll give a number of still-open questions.

Background: No particular background required.

• Date: Wed Oct 28
• Time: 3-3:50pm
• Room: MH320
• Snacks: 2:30pm in MH331B

For more information, click here to see the full flyer, suitable for printing and posting.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming events:

• The last colloquium of the semester will be held on Wed Nov 18.
  Speaker: Nic Brummell, UCSC

Click here to go to the Math/Stats Colloquium page.

This week, the math/stats colloquium welcomes Federico Ardila (SFSU) to talk about “Positroids, 1/e^2, and a conjecture of Da Silva”.  Positroids are beautiful objects which have been discovered independently at least twice: In 1987 Da Silva defined “positively oriented matroids” as generalizations of the cyclic polytope, the polytope of n vertices and d dimensions with the largest possible number of faces, and in 2006 Postnikov defined “positroids” in his study of matrices whose maximal minors are non-negative.  They have received great attention recently, since Arkani Hamed et al. found intriguing applications to quantum field theory.  This talk proves that the theories of positroids and positively oriented matroids are equivalent (a 1987 conjecture of Da Silva), and along the way, proving that the probability that a positroid is connected is 1/e^2.

Joint work with Felipe Rincon and Lauren Williams.

Background: This talk will assume no previous knowledge of positroids, and will be accessible to undergraduates.

• Date: Wed Oct 21
• Time: 3-3:50pm
• Room: MH320
• Snacks: 2:30pm in MH331B

For more information, click here to see the full flyer, suitable for printing and posting.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming events:

• Wed Oct 28: Ethan Berkove, Lafayette College
  “Solving the Color Cubes Puzzle”
• Wed Nov 04: NO COLLOQUIUM (department meeting)

Click here to go to the Math/Stats Colloquium page.

This week, the Math/Stats Colloquium is excited to have Frank Sottile (Texas A&M) showing us “Some algebraic geometry in applications”.  Algebraic geometry is the study of sets that arise as the common zeroes to a collection of polynomials.  It is a deep and powerful subject, combining geometric intuition with algebraic precision.  It is also increasingly a useful tool in applications of mathematics, for whenever polynomials arise, the methods of algebraic geometry may be brought to bear on the problem at hand.  This talk will illustrate this growing trend through a series of interrelated examples of algebraic geometry arising in applications.

Background: A first course in linear algebra.

• Date: Wed Oct 14
• Time: 3-3:50pm
• Room: MH320
• Snacks: 2:30pm in MH331B

For more information, click here to see the full flyer, suitable for printing and posting.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming events:

• Wed Oct 21: Federico Ardila, SFSU
  “Positroids, 1/e^2, and a conjecture of Da Silva”
• Wed Oct 28: Ethan Berkove, Lafayette College
  “Solving the Color Cubes Puzzle”

Click here to go to the Math/Stats Colloquium page.