Past Events

My talk will culminate in a model for chemical gradient detection by migrating cells that change shape. I will first present a method for solving reaction-advection-diffusion equations inside a deforming region, with a moving boundary. The method...

Abstract:Analysis of shotgun sequenced environmental DNA, known as metagenomics, promises insight into the taxonomic and functional composition of microbial communities. To overcome challenges associated with the fragmentary, non-overlapping nature...

Richard Montgomery received undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and physics from Sonoma State in Northern California. He completed his PhD under Jerry Marsden at Berkeley in 1986, after which he held a Moore Instructorship at MIT for two years...

Climate change is probably the largest problem ever faced by mankind—we have literally arrived at a point where we could feasibly destroy our own habitat. So what role can mathematics play in helping address this challenge? I believe that mathematics...

Abstract Life is almost synonymous with autonomous motion, and the varied solutions invented by nature to accomplish movement beg the question of what general principles are used ? Using examples from the dynamics of macromolecular spring and...

Dates: Monday, May 28, 3:00 pm Wednesday, May 30, 3:00 pm Location: WMAX 110, 1933 West Mall May 28: Asymptotic dimension Most of the talk will be an introduction to asymptotic dimension, a notion of dimension invariant under quasi-isometries. I will...

About the Niven Lectures: Ivan Niven was a famous number theorist and expositor; his textbooks have won numerous awards and have been translated into many languages. They are widely used to this day. Niven was born in Vancouver in 1915, earned his...

From flapping birds to space telescopes: The modern science of Origami. The last decade of this past century has been witness to a revolution in the development and application of mathematical techniques to origami, the centuries-old Japanese art of...

Abstract Evolutionary game theory helps to investigate the role of incentives in promoting cooperative behavior in joint enterprises. In particular, this lecture deals with the surprising effects of optional participation in collaborative enterprises...

Abstract: High contrast in electrical conductivity motivates the investigation of electromagnetic methods in geophysics, for instance, for hydrocarbon and mineral exploration. A straightforward approach to modelling the spatial distribution of this...