SMMG – January 2025

Date: January 26th, 2024

Time: 12pm-2pm

Location: PMA 4.102

Speaker: Jacob Gaiter

Title: Surfaces, Water Droplets, and Polygons

Abstract: Surfaces seem to pop up everywhere, from the spheres of classical Euclidean geometry to the surface of a donut. If I handed you a beach ball and an inner tube, you could immediately distinguish these two shapes--the most notable difference between them is that a beach ball doesn't have a hole, while an inner tube has a gap in the middle. While this intuitively shows us these shapes must be different in some sense, in this talk we will establish a more mathematically rigorous way of distinguishing them.

 

TBD

The AMC 8

Dates: Thursday, January 23rd, 2025

Time: 6:15pm

Location: UTC, Room 2.112A

For more information and registration, click here!
TBD

The AIME I

Dates: Thursday, February 6th, 2025

Time: TBD

Location: TBD

For more information, click here!

SMMG – February 2025

Date: February 9th, 2025

Time: 12pm-2pm

Location: PMA 4.102

Speaker: Daniel Koizumi

Title: Secret Codes and Messaging

Abstract: One of the most desirable things to do in life is to keep your secrets from being heard by other people. Let's say you have a message you'd like to exchange to someone else that you'd like to keep secret between yourself and the other person. There are plenty of ways to do this, but mathematics provides a myriad of solid ways to encrypt your messages. In this talk, we will discuss public key exchange and RSA encryption techniques.

 
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SMMG – February 2025

Date: February 23rd, 2025

Time: 12pm-2pm

Location: PMA 4.102

Speaker: Sai Sivakumar

Title: Binary and Non-decimal Numeration

Abstract: While we have all learned to use the decimal system in our daily lives, modern technology relies on a non-decimal system of representing numbers known as binary. From the point of view of computer science, binary is an efficient way of representing data that we can easily check the integrity of, among other benefits. In general, binary and other non-decimal systems provide convenient ways of representing data that can take advantage of divisibility, precision, simpler calculations, and the combinatorics of the system. In this talk we will go over a few non-decimal systems, their history, as well as cool applications to mathematics and computer science, ranging from error correction to spreadsheet labeling, the Cantor set, and other complex fractals.


 

SMMG – March 2025

Date: March 9th, 2025

Time: 12pm-2pm

Location: PMA 4.102

Speaker: Mark Saving

Title: What Day Is It?

Abstract: In one sense, time always moves forward. But in another sense, time wraps around endlessly like a circle: seven days after a Thursday, it is once again a Thursday. We develop modular arithmetic and use it to come up with clever “divisibility rules”. We also describe the math needed to calculate the day of the week from the date. As an application, we prove today is Sunday.*

*Note that this proof may not work if attempted on other days of the week.

SMMG – April 2025

Date: April 6th, 2025

Time: 12pm-2pm

Location: PMA 4.102

Speaker: Casandra Monroe

Title: Turing Machines and the Halting Problem

Abstract: We'll discuss the idea of Turing machines, which is the fancy name we use for computers when we want to think about them by using math. Using this, we'll be able to talk about why we can prove there are some things that computers will never ever be able to do!

 
TBD

SMMG – April 2025

Date: April 20th, 2025

Time: 12pm-2pm

Location: PMA 4.102

Speaker: TBA

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA