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SMMG – September 2025Date: September 7th, 2025 Time: 12pm-2pm Location: PMA 4.102 Speaker: Ansel Goh Title: (un)Knots and Games Abstract: Take your mom’s favorite necklace, unhook the ends, tangle it up, and superglue the ends back together. Congrats! You just made a (mathematical) knot! Unfortunately, you also just made a very angry mother. Now that the ends are permanently glued together, can you still untangle it back to its original shape? In this talk, we’ll discover just how much trouble you’re in. Afterwards, we’ll recover from this stressful scenario by playing some fun unknotting games.
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SMMG – September 2025Date: September 21st, 2025 Time: 12pm-2pm Location: PMA 4.102 Speaker: Andrew Moore Title: Limits Aren’t Fair! Abstract: Everyone knows that some games aren’t fair---whoever goes first will win, for instance, if they know how to play. Many mathematical ideas can be turned into statements about who has a guaranteed way to win a particular game. I will define limits, the fundamental concept of calculus, through a kind of unfair guessing game. In fact, this is the true definition of a limit, usually hidden from students until advanced college courses. Learning it this way will give you your own sort of unfair advantage.
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SMMG – October 2025Date: October 5th, 2025 Time: 12pm-2pm Location: PMA 4.102 Speaker: Iris Jiang Title: Curvature and Surfaces Abstract: When you’re eating a slice of pizza, sometimes it flops down, making it harder to eat. Folding your pizza in half stops this from happening. Why is that? In this talk, we will explore the geometric idea of curvature, and some of its many consequences on surfaces.
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SMMG – October 2025Date: October 19th, 2025 Time: 12pm-2pm Location: PMA 4.102 Speaker: Jeffrey Cheng Title: Some proofs of the pythagorean theorem Abstract: The pythagorean theorem is one of the most famous theorems in mathematics and has been known to be true for thousands of years. However, in the past couple of years, some new proofs of the pythagorean theorem were discovered by high school students! We will talk about the pythagorean theorem and go through some of the proofs, both the very old ones and the very new ones.
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SMMG – November 2025Date: November 2nd, 2025 Time: 12pm-2pm Location: PMA 4.102 Speaker: Ryan Wandsnider Title: Prime Numbers and Gaussian Integers Abstract: A prime number is an integer with exactly two factors: 1 and itself. By multiplying primes together, we can write every integer as a unique product of primes: its prime factorization. In this talk, we will first discuss some key properties of primes, then investigate their role in a "bigger" set of numbers called the Gaussian integers.
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The AMC 10/12
Dates: 10/12 A: Wednesday, November 5th, 2025 Time: 6:15pm Location: TBA For more information and registration, click here! |
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SMMG – November 2025Date: November 16th, 2025 Time: 12pm-2pm Location: PMA 4.102 Speaker: Aru Mukherjea Title: Symmetries and Groups Abstract: In nature and in mathematics, symmetries appear in many different ways, like the rotational symmetry of a snowflake, or the reflection symmetry of a butterfly. How can we describe how many and what kinds of symmetries something has? We’ll answer this question -- and some others -- by introducing the mathematical notion of a group.
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SMMG
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Other activities in which SMMG participates:
The American Mathematical Competitions
