Graduate Student Colloquium

The following is a selection of past talks from the Mathematics Department Graduate Student Colloquium. For up to date information see Evan Franchere.

The colloquium is typically held on Wednesdays from 4:00pm to 5:00pm with pizza and soda served at 4:00pm and the presentation beginning at 4:15pm. It is most often held in POT 745 but may occasionally be elsewhere.

Previous Semesters

Fall 2021

Date Presenter Title
September 8 Joe Cummings Blowups of Toric Surfaces and Hirzebruch-Jung Continued Fractions
September 15 Carissa Slone Characterizing 2-slices Over $C_2$ and $K_4$
September 22 Allison Fitisone A Cone Decomposition for Computing Normalized Solid Angle Measures of Polyhedral Cones
September 29 Landon Gauthier Inverse Problems
October 6 Ben Braun Fall Forum Regarding Graduate Program Funding
October 13 Ben Jany Relations Between Linear Codes and Matroids
October 20 Edison Mucllari Optimal Transport, Monge Problem and How We Can Fix It by Using Kantarovich Formulation
October 27 Vasily Zadorozhnyy Introduction into the World of Recurrent Neural Networks and Transformers
November 3 Camille Schuetz Local Well-Posedness of the Cauchy Problem
November 10 Will Gustafson Minor Posets of Graphs and Polymatroids
November 17 Jonathan Benoit Video Denoising via Directional Fractional Order Total Variation
December 1 Kathryn Hechtel Roos Bound for Skew Cyclic Codes

Spring 2021

Date Presenter Title
February 3 Derek Hanely and Chloe Wawrzyniak Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Open Forum
February 10 Chase Ashby Practical Interpolation Schemes for Researchers
February 24 Justin Barhite Proof by Picture
March 3 William Gustafson Bruhat Order on 312-Avoiding Permutations
March 10 Derek Hanely Perfect Matching Polytopes for Grid Graphs
March 17 Camille Schuetz Existence of Solutions to the Schrodinger Equation
March 24 Ben Jany r-th Generalized Weights of Rank Metric Codes: A q-matroid Approach
March 31 Graduate Student Council Feedback Forum
April 7 Robery Righi Introduction to Almost Periodic Functions
April 14 Samir Donmazov Existence and Uniquiness of a Solution for Linearized Elasticity Equation
April 21 Joseph Cummings An Introduction to Phylogenetics
April 28 Edison Mucllari Convolutional Neural Networks

Fall 2020

Date Presenter Title
August 26 Joseph Cummings Bizarre Polytopes
September 2 William Gustafson Combinatorics of the Positroid Stratification of the Grassmannian
September 9 Derek Hanely The Perron-Frobenius Theorem & Applications
September 16 Landon Gauthier Prove Uniqueness in a Unique Way
September 23 Courtney George An Introduction to Tropical Geometry
September 30 Matias von Bell The 'Main Theorem' of Discrete Morse Theory
October 7 Derek Hanely and Chloe Wawrzyniak Grad Student Voices in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts
October 14 Ben Jany Independent Space of q-Polymatroid
October 21 Carissa Slone How to Calculate the Homotopy of \Sigma^{n\sigma} HF_2 over C_2
October 28 Chase Ashby Efficient Parallel Mesh Redistribution
November 4 Darleen Perez-Lavin Let’s Talk Symmetry
November 11 Justin Barhite The Hairy Ball Theorem

Spring 2020

Date Presenter Title
January 29 Aida Maraj Managing Infinity with Regular Languages and Finite Automata
February 5 Matias von Bell nu-Schroeder Combinatorics and the nu-Associahedron
February 12 Angela Hanson An Introduction to Affine Geometry
February 26 Ben Jany Rank-Metric Codes and Their Associated Matroids
March 11 Cole Pospisil Input-Output Equivalence of Unitary and Contractive RNNs
March 25 Chase Ashby Time Traveling with Integration by Parts
April 1 Landon Gauthier The Naive Way to Solve PDEs
April 8 Justin Barhite String Diagrams and Traces
April 15 Darleen Perez-Lavin General Linear Tilings of a 1 x n Board

Fall 2019

Date Presenter Title
September 4 Justin Barhite Abstract Nonsense
September 18 Kalila Sawyer Life Isn't Fair, and Neither Is Voting
September 25 Lisa Mueller Process View of Functions
October 2 Joe Cummings An Introduction to Elliptic Curves
October 9 Chase Ashby Deriving Estimates of Integral Functionals for Aerospace Applications
October 16 Hunter Lehmann Latin Squares, Affine Planes, and a Russian General
October 23 Landon Gauthier A Useful Theorem in Linear Algebra
October 30 Darleen Perez-Lavin What is TDA?
November 13 Derek Hanely Polytopes: A Friendly Introduction
November 20 Deborah Blevins A Comparative Study of Timing-Based CAN IDS Implementation and The Unreasonable Stability of HDBSCAN
December 4 Will Gustafson The Uncrossing Partial Order on Matchings and a Bijection Between Catalan Paths and 313-avoiding Permutations

Spring 2019

Date Presenter Title
January 16 Matias von Bell Pólya's Enumeration Theorem - Counting With Symmetry
February 6 Joe Cummings An Introduction to Toric Varieties and T-Varieties
February 13 George Lytle Approximations in the Inverse Conductivity Problem
February 20 Hunter Lehmann Some Properties of Skew Polynomial Rings
March 20 Julie Vega Techniques for Determining the Homotopy Type of Matching Complexes
March 27 Carissa Slone Fun Ways to Build Spheres and Other Things
April 3 James Vees Intro to Intro to Elliptic Homogenization
April 10 Jay White Bounding Betti Numbers
April 17 Deborah Wilkerson The Smallest Solution of an Isotropic Quadratic Form, Part 1.5

Fall 2018

Date Presenter Title
August 29 George Lytle Compact Operators and You
September 5 Kaelin Cook-Powell k-Uniform Displacement Tableaux and Geometry
September 12 Hunter Lehmann Sidon Spaces and Cyclic Subspace Codes
September 19 Brian Davis Predicting the Integer Decomposition Property via Machine Learning
September 26 Kalila Sawyer Stacks of Boxes are Better than Chains of Loops
October 3 Joe Cummings Gröbner Bases
October 10 Shane Clark Fixed Points on Play-doh
October 17 Deborah Wilkerson Biquadratic Reciprocity
October 24 Julie Vega Hajós Constructions, Neighborhood Complexes, and Chromatic Number
October 31 Susanna Lange Rational Associahedra and Noncrossing Partitions
November 7 Kasey Bray SVD Galore!
November 14 Darleen Perez-Lavin Conversation on Jobs Outside Academia
November 28 Ang Li An Introduction to Discrete Geometric Homotopy
December 5 Aida Maraj Why We All Love Polynomials!- An Algebraist Point of View

Spring 2018

Date Presenter Title
January 17 McCabe Olsen Grobner Bases and Combinatorics
January 24 Shane Clark Topological Fixed Point Theory and an Application
January 31 Landon Gauthier The Harmonic Series Minus Some Stuff
February 7 Lisa Mueller 2 Colorable Chord Diagrams
February 14 Joseph Cummings A Bijection Between Parking Functions and Shi Arrangement
February 21 Karthik Chandrasekhar & Vasily Zadoroznyy A Combina(toric) Road Into the Hyperbolic World & A Group Theory Version of the Lights Out Game
March 7 Justin Barhite Two Spheres are Better Than One
March 21 Andrés Vindas Geometric Medley
March 28 Kalila Sawyer A Brief Set Up of Finite Geometry
April 11 Aida Maraj & Julie Vega If You Give a Mouse a Poison Cupcake...!
April 18 Kaelin Cook-Powell
April 25 Hunter Lehmann How to Explain Zero-Knowledge Proofs to Children (and Maybe Other People Too)

Fall 2017

Date Presenter Title
August 30 Kaelin Cook-Powell Graphs and Chips and Fires, Oh My!
September 6 Tefjol Pllaha Introduction to Quantum Computing
September 13 Landon Gauthier & Vasily Zadorozhnyy Geometry of Quartic Polynomials & A New Triangle Generation of Generalized Genocchi Numbers Using Rook Placements on Genocchi Boards
September 20 Kyle Franz Just So You Know, Spectral Graph Theory is a Thing. Let's Talk About That.
September 27 Kalila Sawyer Mathematicians Have Always Been... Interesting
October 4 Andrés Vindas Fixed Subpolytopes of the Permutahedron
October 11 Justin Barhite Riemann-Like, Super-Lebesgue
October 18 Aida Maraj Algebra in Statistics
October 25 Derek Hanely The Erdos-Lovasz Double-Critical Conjecture
November 1 Lisa Mueller & Gabbie van Scoy Research in Graph Theory & A Bone Eat Bone World: Math Models of Bone Metabolism
November 8 George Lytle When are Two Directions Enough? The Gehring-Lehto Theorem
November 15 Kaelin Cook-Powell Exam Week: A Tropical Excursion!
November 29 Stephen Deterding The Hartogs Extension Phenomenon
December 6 Joe Cummings Contemplating Tutte Polynomials

Fall 2016

Date Presenter Title
August 31 George Lytle Quintessential Quadrature: A Look at the Trapezoid Rule
September 7 Luis Sordo-Vieira Burnsides p^aq^b Theorem
September 14 Morgan Schreffler Generalized Functions
September 21 Julianne Vega Just Your Average American: How NPR Inspired Me to Learn About Orbifolds
September 28 Jared Antrobus & Wesley Hough Websites & More
October 5 Joe Cummings A Bijection Between Parking Functions and Regions of the Shi Arrangement
October 12 Kaelin Cook-Powell The Nullstellensatze
October 19 Lola Davidson The SVD, LBD, and My Experience at MathWorks
October 26 Ryan Peterz Neural Networks (mod Computer Science)
November 2 McCabe Olsen Convex Lattice Polytopes and Ehrhart Theory
November 9 George Lytle The Hardy-Littlewood-Sobolev Inequality
November 16 Eric Kaper Mathematics and Literature
November 30 Stephen Deterding One Line Proof of Picard's Theorem Using Nevanlinna Theory
December 7 Darleen Perez-Lavin Perspectives on Coxeter Groups

Spring 2016

Date Presenter Title
January 20 George Lytle Lines! Surfaces! Solids! Oh my!
January 27 Tefjol Pllaha Quantum Teleportation and Super Dense Coding
February 3 Shane Clark K-Theory
February 10 McCabe Olsen Grobner Bases and Combinatorics
February 17 Wesley Hough Independent Sets, Matchings, and Line Graphs
February 24 Dustin Hedmark Sports Rankings
March 2 Ian Barnett Hilbert's Grand Hotel and Casino
March 9 Isaiah Harney Random Graphs and That Strange Uncle Who May or May Not Have an Amphetamine Problem
March 30 Cyrus Hettle Prime Representing Functions
April 6 Rachel Petrik Ostrowski's Theorem and p-adic Absolute Values
April 13 Darleen Perez-Lavin Davneport Constant
April 20 Devin Willmott An Introduction to Semi-Supervised Learning
April 27 Neville Fogarty How to Succeed in Graduate School without Really Trying

Fall 2015

Date Presenter Title
September 2 McCabe Olsen The Coinvariant Algebra of S_n
September 9 George Lytle Frames: Capturing More than a Kodak Moment
September 16 Wesley Hough Independence Complexes and Matching Trees: The Cell Stands Alone!
September 23 Michael Music The Dbar operator, Complex Analysis, and Maybe Some Inverse Scattering Theory
September 30 Luis Sordo Viera C_i Fields
October 7 UK Chapter of AWM "Ask a Grad Student!" Panel
October 14 Virginia Ahalt, Deputy Director, SPORT Information Session on the NSA's Summer Program in Operations Research Technology
October 21 Stephen Deterding The Split-Complex Numbers
November 4 Kalila Sawyer Geometric Multiplicities and Gersgorin Discs
November 11 Shane Clark Hausdorffization and Such
November 18 Isaiah Harney Codes, Colorings, and Transistion Spaces
December 2 Cyrus Hettle Division by 2, 3, and n without the Axiom of Choice
December 9 Neville Fogarty The Math of Set

Summer 2015

Date Presenter Title
June 18 Dustin Hedmark RSK Algorithm
June 25 Stephen Deterding The Swiss Cheese
July 1 Rob Davis The Graph of the Associahedron
July 9 Florian Kohl & Neville Fogarty Pick's Theorem & The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever
July 14 Kasey Bray & Shane Clark Iterations of the Newton Map of tan(z) & A Topological Proof of the Infinitude of Primes
July 16 Cyrus Hettle & McCabe Olsen Arithmetic Subsequences in Ramsey Theory; Schur Functions
July 23 Ian Barnett & Devin Wilmott Surreal Numbers & robotapocalypse.exe
July 30 Isaiah Harney A Motivated Proof of the Irrationality of Pi
August 5 Eric Kaper & Brian Davis What is an Abelian Group? & Frobenius Numbers and Coin Problem

Spring 2015

Date Presenter Title
January 28 Sam Herschenfeld Hilbert's Tenth Problem
February 4 Dustin Hedmark Volume of a Simplex and the Cayley-Menger Determinant
February 11 Wesley Hough Non-vanishing Homology of the Matching Complex
February 18 Karthik Chandrasekhar Topological Combina(toric)s
February 25 Neville Fogarty An Introduction to Skew-polynomial Rings
March 4 Bill Trok Basics of Computational Analysis
March 11 Cyrus Hettle Schnirelmann Density and Mann's Theorem
March 25 McCabe Olsen Mahonian Pairs
April 1 Ian Barnett The Banach-Tarski Paradox
April 8 Chase Russell Hölder Continuity of Weak Solutions
April 15 Stephen Deterding What do you get if you add up all the counting numbers?
April 22 George Lytle Calderón's Problem and Scattering Theory
April 29 Luis Sordo Vieira A Proof by Witt Wedderburn's Little Theorem

Fall 2014

Date Presenter Title
September 10 Stephen Deterding Palindromes
September 17 Lola Davidson Efficient Solutions of Large Saddle-Point Systems
September 24 Luis Sordo-Vieira A Result for Additive Equations
October 1 Carolyn Troha Coding Theory
October 8 Scott Brewer Composition of Formal Power Series
October 15 Brian Davis The Chromatic Polynomial and Graph Colorings
October 22 Luis Sordo-Vieira Quadratic Reciprocity
October 29 Isaiah Harney Graph Products, Fourier Analysis, and Spectral Techniques
November 5 Chad Linkous Differential Forms
November 12 Jiaqi Liu Inverse Scattering on the Line
November 19 Cyrus Hettle Derangements and Discrete Morse Theory
December 10 Rob Davis Gelfand-Tsetlin Polytopes

Fall 2012

Date Presenter Title
August 22 Dr. Peter Perry & Kayla Blyman First-Ever Graduate Student Business Meeting
August 29 Aaron Saxton Differential Operators: How Linear Algebra and PDEs are Related
September 5 Wesley Hough & Luis Sordo Vieira Permutation Pattern Avoidance and the Catalan Triangle & Bees, Tilings, and Isoperimetry in the Plane
September 12 Jon Constable How Does a Mathematician Become an Entrepreneur (and Hopefully Make Money)?
September 26 Nick Armenoff Linear Codes and Commutative Algebra
October 3 Michael Music An Inverse Problem from X-ray Imaging
October 10 Megan Gier The Discrete Fourier Transform
October 24 Jonathan Thompson A Brief Introduction to Manifolds and Vector Bundles
October 31 Rob Davis (Some of) The Magic Behind Magic Squares
November 7 Carolyn Troha Cyclic Orbit Codes
November 28 Dr. Kate Ponto What Are Job Talks Like?
December 5 Sarah Nelson The Gleason-Pierce-Ward Theorem

Spring 2012

Date Presenter Title
February 1 Jonathan Thompson On Cell Structures and the Infinite Real Grassmanian
February 15 Furuzan Ozbek Homological Algebra
February 29 Dr. Carl Lee An Interactive Introduction to Geogebra
March 21 Stephen Sturgeon Combinatorics of Boij-Soderberg
March 28 Ryan Walker Intuition in the Spectral Theory of the Schoedinger Equation
April 4 Bill Robinson Higher Homotopy Groups
April 18 Brad Fox Polytopes, Posets, and the cd-index
April 25 John Mosley General Genera

Fall 2010

Date Presenter Title
September 8 Ryan Walker CT Scans and an Introduction to Inverse Problems
September 15 Eric Clark When Rooks (Can't) Attack
September 22 Andrew Wilfong Genera and the Curvature of Manifolds
September 29 Dr. Alan Demlow An Introduction to Finite Element Exterior Calculus
October 13 Dr. Kate Ponto The Jordan Curve Theorem and the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem
October 27 Dennis Moore Integer Partitions
November 3 Jonathan Thompson On Irrational Dimension
November 10 Stephen Sturgeon Free Resolution of Ferrer's Ideals
December 1 Dr. Bonnie Smith Cayley-Bacharach Theorems Through the Centuries
December 8 Furuzan Ozbek Projective Class of Sequences in an Arbitrary Pointed Category

Spring 2010

Date Presenter Title
January 27 Dr. John Lewis Symmetry Problems in PDE
February 3 Jay Hineman & Ryan Walker A LaTeX Tutorial
February 10 David Cook II Macaulay 2: Algebra and Combinatorics with Computers
February 17 Dr. David Leep Hilbert's 17th Problem
February 24 Beth Kirby Characteristic Classes in Algebraic Topology
March 3 Dr. Jeff Ovall Efficient and Reliable Finite Element Approximations for Elliptic Eigenvalue Problems

Fall 2009

Date Presenter Title
September 2 Dr. Jack Schmidt Sylow Theorems
September 9 Dr. Paul Eakin Managing the "Yellow Menu" and Other Features of WHS
September 16 DJ Wells Counting on Small Polytopes: Enumerating Shellable Patches and Shelling Orders of Simplicial Polytopes with Few Vertices
September 23 Josh Roberts An Introduction to Applied Algebraic Topology: Persistent Homology
September 30 Dr. Alan Demlow Establishing Convergence of Adaptive Finite Element Methods: Proof or Experiment?
October 7 Dr. Serge Ochanine Elliptic Functions and Modular Forms in Topology
October 14 Dr. Avinash Sathaye Conic Sections in Algebraic Geometry
October 21 Jay Hineman Calculus of Variations and the Mountain Pass Theorem
October 28 Drs. Ott, Braun, Ovel Job Search Advice
November 11 Dr. Lawrence Harris Best Estimates for Derivatives of Multivariate Polynomials
November 18 Dr. Benjamin Braun Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem

Spring 2009

Date Presenter Title
January 21 Ryan Walker The Black-Scholes Equation
February 4 Dr. Carl Lee Counting on Polyhedra
February 11 Dr. Katharine Ott Blind Image Deconvolution: Making Blurry Images Clear
February 18 Dr. Richard Ehrenborg A Brief Introduction to Coxeter Groups and Juggling
February 25 David Cook II The Weak Lefschetz Property
March 4 Dr. Benjamin Braun Enumerating Integer Points in Lattice Simplices
March 11 Dr. Darren Tapp Real and Algebraic Geometry, a Bridge
March 25 Laura Steil A Brief Introduction to p-adic Numbers
April 1 Dr. Peter Perry Making (Nonlinear) Waves
April 15 Josh Roberts A Topological Introduction to Group Homology
April 22 DJ Wells How to Build a Polytope: Shelling, Flipping, and Beyond

Fall 2008

Date Presenter Title
September 3 Josh Roberts The Grothendieck Group
September 10 Nicolas Kirby The Diffusion Equation as a Macroscopic Version of a Microscopic Game
September 17 Dr. Harris Polynomial Interpolation in Two Variables and Markov's Theorem
September 24 Eric Kahn Vectors and Where They Can Lead
October 1 Tricia Muldoon Brown Techniques for Counting ab-Words
October 8 Erin Militzer $L^p$ - Bounded Point Evaluations and Uniform Rational Approximation
October 15 Dr. Brennan Algebraic Themes in Function Theory
October 22 Dr. Mann Some Studies in Mathematics of Materials
October 29 Dr. Ye Google's PageRank and Large Scale Matrix Eigenvalue Problems
November 5 Dr. Readdy An Introduction to Mixed Volumes
November 12 Julie Miker Art of the Infinite: A Book Review of Sorts
November 19 Eric Clark
December 3 Dr. Lewis
December 10 Joel Kilty

Spring 2008

Date Presenter Title
January 30 Phuoc Ho Classical Hodge Theorem
February 6 Jonny Groves History of the Bierbach Conjecture
February 13 Dr. Benjamin Braun Discrete Hodge Theory
February 20 Zhongyi Nie Estimate for an Integral by Interpolation Method
February 27 Josh Roberts Group Presentations and 2-Dimensional CW-Complexes
March 5 Scott Godefroy Determination of Crystallographic Texture from an Orientation Map
March 19 David Cook II H-Matrices
April 9 Chris Frayer Solitons and the KdV Equation
April 16 Joel Kilty A Prize-less Problem- The Stokes System
April 23 Dr. Changyou Wang

Fall 2007

Date Presenter Title
September 12 Dr. Benjamin Braun Graph Homomorphism Complexes
September 19 Dr. Robert Molzon Random Matching
September 26 Shelly Bouchat Cellular Resolutions
October 3 Sonja Petrovic Some Toric Ideals in Theory and Applications (Toric Ideals, Demystified!)
October 10 Jonny Groves Singularities of Power Series and Pringsheim's Theorem
October 17 Joel Kilty Fourier Analysis on Finite Abelian Groups
October 24 Dr. Alan Demlow Adaptive Finite Element Methods on Surfaces
October 31 Eric Kahn Complex Representations and Schur's Lemma
November 7 Julie Miker Symmetric Rearrangements and the Faber-Krahn Inequality
November 14 Carlos Nicolas Some Results in Geometric Discrepancy Theory
November 28 Josh Roberts Fun with the (Cantor-)Bernstein-Schroeder Theorem
December 5 Michael Slone What Lies Between Structure and Randomness

Fall 2005

Date Presenter Title
September 14 Shelly Bouchat Summer School Opportunities with MSRI
October 5 Michael Slone Compactness in Logic
October 19 Dr. Michel Jabbour On Some Aspects of the Mathematical Modeling of Crystal Growth
November 2 Dr. Peter Perry Counting Permutations with Perron & Frobenius
November 9 Yuho Shin The Volume of Sub-Riemannian ε-ball of Heisenberg Group
November 15 Dr. Serge Ochanine Jacobi Functions in Topology
November 30 Dr. Lawrence Harris Schwarz's Lemma and Non-Euclidean Geometry

Fall 2004

Date Presenter Title
September 15 Pat Quillen, James Money, Dan Pinzon The Basics of Writing in LaTeX
September 22 Dr. Richard Ehrenborg Two Theorems and a Lemma
September 29 Matthew Ragland Generalizations of T-groups
October 6 Seongjai Kim Loss and Recovery of Fine Structures in PDE-based Image Denoising and Image Zooming
October 13 Josh Strodtbeck Multitarget Tracking with the Probability Hypothesis Density
October 20 Dr. Peter Perry When Is a Nonlinear Equation Really Linear?
October 27 Michael Slone How to Count Spanning Trees
November 3 Dr. Marian Anton The Milnor Conjecture
November 10 Jonathan Groves Nice Polynomials with Three Roots
November 17 Dr. Uwe Nagel Simplicial Polytopes and Their Graded Betti Numbers
November 30 Matthew Ragland Generalizations of T-groups
December 7 Dr. Richard Millman Teaching Mathematics and Looking for a Position at Liberal Arts Colleges