All talks begin at 4PM unless otherwise noted. To carpool to Platteville from Loras, meet outside Hennessy 210 by 3:15 on the afternoon of the talk.
If you would like to give a talk at Loras or have questions regarding the colloquium, contact Angela Kohlhaas. Titles and abstracts from previous semesters can be viewed here.
| Date | Location | Speaker | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wednesday September 12 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Susan Crook Jonas Meyer Loras |
Inquiry Based Learning and the R.L. Moore Conference |
| Friday September 21 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Morgan Fonley Mary Therese Padberg Univ. of Iowa |
Exploring the Building Blocks of Life: DNA and Water |
| Thursday September 27 |
UW-Platteville Ottensman 126 |
Leonida Ljumanovic UWP |
Infinite Continued Fractions and Best Approximations |
| Thursday October 11 |
UW-Platteville Ottensman 126 |
Rob Calcaterra UWP |
The Kuratowski Theorem |
| Thursday October 18 |
UW-Platteville Ottensman 126 |
Alumni UWP |
Career Panel Discussion Sponsored by UWP Math Club |
| 3:30 Wednesday October 24 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Katie Burke Loras |
Reduction Numbers of Monomial Ideals |
| 4:30 Wednesday October 24 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Cassandra Thill |
How Many Sudokus Are There? |
| Thursday October 25 |
UW-Platteville Ottensman 126 |
Irfan Ul-Haq UWP |
How Can I Become Part of a Solution?. |
| 3:30 Wednesday October 31 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Rabin Ranabhat Loras |
Numerical Solutions of Ordinary Differential Equations |
| 3:30 Wednesday November 7 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Joseph Wolter Loras |
Expanding the Ordinals: Constructing Integer Ordinals |
| Thursday November 8 |
UW-Platteville Ottensman 126 |
Chad Vidden UWP |
An Introduction to Galerkin Methods |
| Tuesday November 20 |
UW-Platteville Ottensman 126 |
Kumer Pial Das Lamar University |
Parameter Estimation for the Generalized Pareto Distribution |
| Friday November 30 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Susan Crook Loras |
Putting the Pieces Together: The Math of Puzzle Assembly |
| Wednesday December 5 |
Loras College Hennessy 350 |
Dan Willis Loras |
Trends in Undergraduate Research in the Mathematical Sciences |
The Moore Method of mathematics education is based on the idea that students learn best when they discover mathematics for themselves rather than being told. This method and its adaptations, known as Inquiry Based Learning (or discovery learning), provide alternatives to lecture-based courses that get students more actively involved at all levels. The Legacy of R.L. Moore Conference is held annually to disseminate IBL information and experience among mathematics instructors.
The presenters will give a brief survey of IBL, including some discussion of the pros and cons of using IBL and its place in present-day mathematics instruction in the U.S. They will also share some of the highlights from the 2012 R.L. Moore conference in Austin, TX, examples of IBL, and experience using it.
We are two graduate students from the University of Iowa who will be giving mini-talks about our research in applied mathematics. First, we will explore the topic of DNA interacting with protein and discuss how we can model its structure. Next we will switch topics and investigate a model representing water flow through a hill slope. Both talks are geared toward students with a calculus background, but should be accessible to all.
After these research talks, we will briefly discuss graduate school and leave ample time for questions. We hope to see you there.
In the first part of the talk we will go over the definition and history of continued fractions. In particular, we will discuss how real numbers can be represented by continued fractions. We will go over some of the basic properties of continued fractions and look at some of their applications. We will also talk about how we can use the Best Approximations and Continued Fractions to prove the irrationality of a number.
Leonida Ljumanovic is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at UW-Platteville. She graduated from the University of Iowa in 2008, under the direction of Dr. George Nelson.
In topology the closure of a set is essentially found by expanding a set to include its boundary. So, for example, the closure of the open interval (0,1) is the closed interval [0,1]. In 1922 Kazimierz Kuratowski proved that if one started with a set and used only the set theoretical operations of closure and complement, one could generate at most 14 different sets. The main thrust of the colloquium will be to prove this fact. In addition, a couple of questions that have recently been posed in Mathematics Magazine which relate to this theorem will be explored.
Rob Calcaterra has been a member of the UWP Mathematics Department since 1983. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College (he grew up a mile or two from Coney Island) and received his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Let I be an ideal of the ring R. We may then define the integral closure of I in R as the set of roots in R of monic polynomials with coefficients in the appropriate powers of I. An ideal J is called a reduction of I if J is contained in I and JIr=Ir+1 for some r. Monomial ideals possess the unique property that their monomial elements can be represented by an integer point lattice known as the exponent set. We will therefore examine how to determine the exponent set of a monomial ideal and subsequently utilize its exponent set to succinctly define its integral closure. We may then use the property that J is a reduction of I if and only if J=I to devise correlations between a monomial ideal's reduction number and the geometry of its exponent set.
Katie Burke is a senior at Loras College. This presentation is in partial fulfillment of the Loras College math major.
We will start by explaining what a Sudoku puzzle is, what the rules are in solving them, and why we will use mini-Sudoku. We will discuss what it means for two puzzles to be "essentially different" along with other terminology. We will use a discussion of symmetries to begin looking at how many "essentially different" puzzles there are for a specific solution. We’ll look at some theories we have developed to narrow our search for the number of “essentially different” puzzles and prove these theories. Finally we will look at potential future work.
Cassie Thill is a senior at Loras College. This presentation is in partial fulfillment of the Loras College math major.
This is Dr. Ul-Haq’s second talk in a series of talks which he is planning to give. Dr. Ul-Haq wants to talk about issues which math faculty face every day and talk (mostly complain) about in hallways, in their offices and in places where they can gather in groups of at least two.
About a year ago he gave a talk titled “Am I Part of the Problem or Solution?” In that talk he established that he is part of the problem. He will briefly describe the problem for the benefit of those who may have not attended the previous talk. In this talk he will focus on how he can become part of a solution.
Irfan Ul-Haq joined the faculty at UW-Platteville in 2005. He has become increasingly interested and involved with issues related to student learning and success at college level. He was recently appointed as the assistant director of UW-Platteville’s Teaching and Learning Center. Irfan’s five year old son, Abdulhaq, challenges him every day to make sure that he is always thinking about the future to make it better for the next generation.
The presentation will provide an introduction to computational methods that approximate the solution of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Some of the methods that will be discussed in the presentation are Euler’s method, Taylor series method, Runge Kutta method of order 2. The relationship between step size and error will be discussed. Further, the presentation will also discuss the stability of different methods like Euler’s method, Backward Euler’s method and Trapezoidal method.
Rabin Ranabhat is a senior at Loras College. This presentation is in partial fulfillment of the Loras College math major.
At the end of the 19th century, mathematician Georg Cantor invented the transfinite numbers, an entire number system of differently sized infinities. This system extended the Natural Numbers (0, 1, 2…) to infinity and beyond.
The goal of our project was to construct additive inverses – or negative Ordinals – on the Ordinals, thus giving us "Integer Ordinals." We did an immediate application of the construction of the integers from the Natural Numbers onto the Ordinal Numbers. This construction fails, and, upon further analysis, we discovered how and why the classic approach fails. Then, we constructed our own form of the Integer Ordinals. This also failed to perform as we had hoped. We determined that this system did not form a group, and we analyzed how and why it failed.
Joseph Wolter is a senior at Loras College. This presentation is in partial fulfillment of the Loras College math major.
Accurately modeling real-world phenomena leads to rather challenging problems. Often such problems are difficult or even impossible to solve exactly. The field of numerical analysis can provide approximate solutions for these problems. With this talk, a class of methods for finding approximate solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) known as discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods will be introduced. The focus of this talk will be designing and analyzing a DG method known as the symmetric direct DG method for parabolic-type PDEs.
Chad Vidden is a new faculty member in the UWP Mathematics Department as of this fall. He graduated from Iowa State University with a doctoral degree in Applied Mathematics and received a bachelor’s degree from Minnesota State University, Mankato.
The generalized Pareto distribution (GPD) is a three-parameter distribution that contains uniform, exponential, triangular, and Pareto distribution as special cases. The GPD has been applied to a number of fields, including in the modeling of large insurance claims, reliability studies, and in the analysis of socio-economic and environmental extreme events. The estimation of GPD parameters is always a challenge. In this study, method of moments, method of simple L-moments and method of trimmed moments have been employed to estimate parameters of the GPD. Monte Carlo simulated data are used to compare these methods. Moreover, parameters obtained by these methods are used to fit the GPD of a number of annual maximum flow series of lower Mississippi river.
Kumer Pial Das obtained his PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Auburn University, Alabama in 2005. He joined the Department of Mathematics at Lamar University, Texas, in 2005. Currently he is an associate professor of statistics. He is a Project NExT fellow. He is also the current president of Conference of Texas Statisticians. His research interest is in the area of statistics, actuarial mathematics and probability theory. Currently, he is spending his sabbatical at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) as a research fellow. He is very much involved in undergraduate and graduate research.
Have you ever considered how you approach putting together a jigsaw puzzle? Do you sort all the pieces first and create the edge? Do you pick a focal point in the image and start there? What knowledge do you collect about each piece before you look for its place?
This is the situation we face when we use computers for object assembly or image recognition. In this talk, we’ll discuss how we approach the problem and the tools we can use to complete the task.
Susan Crook is an Assistant Professor at Loras College. She was previously a graduate student at North Carolina State University.
The speaker will survey what he learned at the recent TURMS conference (Trends in Undergraduate Research in the Mathematical Sciences) in Chicago.
Dan Willis is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Loras College.