Abstracts & Bios for Fall 2010/Spring 2011 Colloquium Series
Date: 16 September (Thursday)
Speaker: Dr. Heidi Hulsizer
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Title: Magic Squares
Abstract: Magic Squares have been around for thousands of years. At their core, they involve solving specific linear equations in nonnegative integers. We let Hn(r) be the number of nxn N-matrices having line sums r, where a line is a row or column and an N-matrix is a matrix whose entries belong to the natural numbers. We look at some specific values of Hn(r), some historic magic squares, and learn to construct them.
Bio: Dr. Heidi Hulsizer was born in Pensacola, Florida, but was raised in Missouri. She graduated from Drury University and then did her graduate work at the University of Missouri – Columbia. She is currently teaching at Hampden-Sydney College and her research is in Commutative Algebra.
Speaker: Deirdre L. Smeltzer
Department Chair and Professor of Mathematics
Title: Red Hat, Blue Hat: An Introduction to Coding Theory
Abstract: What’s the optimal strategy for you and your team to use in guessing randomly-selected hat colors in a “mathematical game show”? A hat has been placed on your head, but you don’t know the color. Should you try to guess the color, or should you pass? And, how does this question relate to codes?
Broadly speaking, coding theory describes any situation in which information is being transmitted from a source to a receiver over a communication channel. In transmitting or storing and reading messages, there is always a possibility of error; to combat this problem, error-detecting or error-correcting codes are employed. This talk will use “the hat problem” to introduce the foundational ideas of coding theory, give a taste of the mathematics involved, and describe some of the many applications of this branch of mathematics.
Bio: Deirdre L. Smeltzer is professor of mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at EMU, as well as co-author of a recently-published geometry textbook. Dr. Smeltzer earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Virginia, where her research focused on algebraic coding theory and other branches of combinatorics.
Speaker: Moa Apagodu
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics
Virginia Commonwealth University
Title:
The Pigeonhole PrincipleAbstract:
The pigeonhole principle also known as Drichlet's principle states that if
n + 1 objects are placed into n boxes, then some boxes contain more than one objects. Unlike many theorems in Mathematics, this principle is "trivial" to state and prove. As trivial as it may sound, the pigeonhole principle has numerous nontrivial applications in many areas of mathematics. We will illustrate the beauty and power of this principle through applications in number theory, graph theory, Ramsey theorems, etc. Believe it or not, we are not going to differentiate nor integrate. Just count.Bio: Moa Apagodu received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, and is now an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research area includes Algebraic and Enumerative Combinatorics, Computer Algebra/Algorithmic Proof Methods, and Experimental Mathematics.