Panel Discussion on Diversity and Belonging in Mathematics

For the last Math Table of the semester, the student group Harvard Gender Inclusivity in Mathematics (GIIM) will be hosting a panel on inclusion in mathematics in our department and beyond. The panel will also discuss some of the common experiences reported in over 35 interviews to women in the department that GIIM has conducted over the past two years (all of which are available on GIIM's social media and will be compiled into a booklet for the event). The panelists will be

• Prof. Lauren Williams (professor)

• Dr. Reshma Menon (preceptor)

• Amanda Burcroff (graduate student)

• Jenny Kaufmann (graduate student)

• Jessica Shand (undergraduate student)

and the panel will be moderated by Sílvia Casacuberta (undergraduate student).

If you're planning to attend, please fill out this form with your food preferences!

Recommending with Recommendations

Speaker: Franklyn Wang

Abstract: Recommendation Systems are a powerful technology that powers many of the largest companies today, like Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook. However, recommendation systems frequently draw upon deeply sensitive personal data. In this talk, we explore how one might construct a recommendation system based solely on other recommendations, which would preserve privacy. We then construct two models, one with a source task and a target task, and one with many target tasks, and sketch out how each model can be addressed. The derivations are very pretty! 

If you're planning to attend, please fill out this form with your food preferences.

Factoring and the Quadratic Sieve

Speaker: Rebecca Saul

Abstract: Integer factorization, an age-old mathematical challenge, acquired new importance in the late twentieth century when the difficulty of factoring began to be employed as a security guarantee for many cryptosystems. These systems, used today in products like printers, routers, and VPNs, would be broken if an attacker was able to factor a publicly available integer associated with the encryption scheme. Following the introduction of these schemes, researchers have become increasingly interested in determining the limits of our current factoring capabilities, a necessary step in properly evaluating the security of these new cryptographic methods. This talk will walk through the development of the quadratic sieve, a general purpose factoring algorithm that runs in subexponential time and forms the basis of many of our best current factoring algorithms, and thus the basis of many of the attacks on modern cryptosystems. 

This talk should be accessible to students comfortable with modular arithmetic and familiar with linear algebra at the level of Math 21B. If you're planning to attend, please fill out this form with your food preferences.

Job Panel

Please join us for a panel discussion about what careers and jobs you can pursue with a background in mathematics. Our panelists are 

• Madalina Persu, quantative researcher at Two Sigma,

• Jackson Wagner, product operations lead at Scale AI,

• Caitlin Stanton, software engineer at Google, and

• Kemen Linsuain, at Capital Guidance.

The panel discussion will take place on Zoom; see here for a link. Please email Phil Wood (pmwood@math.harvard.edu) if you have any issues accessing the link.

Patterns, Play, and Processes: Sounding Topological Graph Theory

Speaker: Jessica Shand

Abstract:  Like any act of transcription or translation, the act of sonification (broadly, the representation of any idea, event, or other entity through non-speech sound) is non-neutral. As such, any sonification of mathematics is also, by necessity, a commentary on the question: what is mathematics? And relatedly, what does it mean to be a mathematician? We explore topological graph theory vis-à-vis several well-known problems and puzzles, offering a series of original songs and compositions—all inspired by the mathematics, and in particular, the field's roots in deeply human practices and experiences—along the way. All are welcome! 

If you're planning to attend, please fill out this form to indicate your food preferences so that we have an accurate count of how many dinners to have.

Random Walks on Groups: Entropy and Asymptotic Behavior

Speaker: Michael Isakov

Abstract:  Entropy is an important tool for quantifying complexity: stemming from thermodynamics and information theory, it can be used to formalize how ``random" a random variable is or measure the divergence of trajectories in dynamical systems. In this talk, we focus on adapting entropy to studying random walks on groups. After introducing the subject, we'll see how entropy can be used to characterize their asymptotic behavior and show some fun, concrete computations.

If you're planning to attend, please fill out this form to indicate your food preferences so that we have an accurate count of how many dinners to have. 

This talk should be accessible to students who have completed Math 21a or 21b.

Nuclear physics in number theory

Speaker: Hari Ramakrishnan Iyer

Abstract:  What does colliding neutrons into atomic nuclei have to do with counting prime numbers? In this talk, we will define the Riemann zeta function, take a detour into random matrix theory inspired by physical intuition, and examine some remarkable data and conjectures relating two seemingly disparate fields.

If you're planning to attend, please fill out this form to indicate your food preferences so that we have an accurate count of how many dinners to have.

This talk references complex numbers and linear algebra, and should be accessible to students who have completed Math 21b.

Snakes on a Plane: Problems in Incidence Geometry 

Speaker: Dora Woodruff

Abstract:  After introducing some fundamental questions and results in discrete geometry (for example, what is the maximum number of times that n points and m lines can intersect in the plane?), I will explain some recent variants of the famous Unit Distance Problem, including some of my own work.  

If you're planning to attend, please fill out this form to indicate your food preferences so that we have an accurate count of how many dinners to have.