Math Club Colloquium
2022 - 2023
Welcome to the Math Club Colloquium pages! Here you will find a record of colloquium talks dating back to 2010. Talks are accessible to a broad audience of students and faculty in mathematics and related disciplines. It is usually held during common hour on Tuesdays from 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm, but the day, time and location does change so please note the details listed by each talk.
Academic Year 2022 - 2023 (Club Homepage and Officers)
Sep 20, 2022: Julia (Iuliia) Inozemtseva (Arizona State University)
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89859514871
Title: Math will save the world: math applications in medicine, AI, and much more
Abstract: Discover the beauty of mathematics in nature, biology, medicine, AI, computer science, engineering and epidemics spread. No matter which subject is your favorite, we will show you how math is changing it in 21st century: from music, medicine to machine learning.
Tue Nov 1, 2022: Igor Erovenko (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87541125253?pwd=V29VT05KTlBGL1dlZ1B2bDhNbStJUT09
Title: A glimpse into behavioral epidemiology: How dynamic human behavior affects the COVID-19 pandemic.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 500 million cases and 6.3 million deaths worldwide to date. No therapeutic drugs are currently available for this novel coronavirus, and all initial measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 were based on reducing contact between infected and susceptible individuals. Most of these measures such as quarantine and self-isolation require voluntary compliance by the population. However, humans may act in their (perceived) self-interest only. We construct a mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission with quarantine and hospitalization coupled with a dynamic game model of adaptive human behavior. Susceptible and infected individuals adopt various behavioral strategies based on perceived prevalence and burden of the disease and sensitivity to isolation measures, and they evolve their strategies using a social learning algorithm (imitation dynamics). This results in complex interplay between the epidemiological model, which affects success of different strategies, and the game-theoretic behavioral model, which in turn affects the spread of the disease. We found that the second wave of the pandemic, which has been observed in the US, can be attributed to rational behavior of susceptible individuals, and that multiple waves of the pandemic are possible if the rate of social learning of infected individuals is sufficiently high. To reduce the burden of the disease on the society, it is necessary to incentivize such altruistic behavior by infected individuals as voluntary self-isolation.
Tue Nov 22, 2022: Donald Taylor-Bruce (Brooklyn College)
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
In Person: 1146 Ingersoll Hall
Title: Hyperbolic, Euclidean, and Spherical geometries
Tue Feb 28, 2023: Math Movie and Lunch
Time: 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm ET
In-Person: 1141 Old Ingersoll
Come for the free pizza, stay for the company!
Tue Mar 14, 2023: Pi Day Celebration with Mark Gibson and Dianna Hubbard (Brooklyn College)
Time: 12:30 - 2:15 pm
In-Person: 1310 Ingersol Hall
Free pizza and dessert pie
Talk: Phi on Pi Day? Get the H Outta Here!
Integration Bee and Pi-Ku writing contest with prizes galore!
Tue Mar 21, 2023: Panel on Careers in Tech and Data Science
Hareem Bokhari, Platform Engineer at Prudential
Eugene Dorokhin, Site Reliability Engineer at Google
Remi Laurence, former Data Scientist at Premise Data
Manshen Lin, Quantitative Developer at Global Equity Derivative - UBS
Time: 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
In Person: 2130 Ingersoll Hall
Please join us to hear their stories, learn about their careers and get their advice on how to make the most of your time at Brooklyn College, stand out, and be resilient in a job landscape that is constantly shifting! Lunch will be served as long as supplies last.
Thur Mar 23, 2023: Physics Department Colloquium
Speaker: Christian Benes (Brooklyn College)
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
In Person: 2130 Ingersoll Hall
Title: Conformal Invariance of Lattice Models from Statistical Mechanics
Abstract: Many physical phenomena can be described by discrete random processes or discrete random configurations: Random walks describe molecular movement; the self-avoiding walk was introduced to describe the behavior of polymers; the Ising model is a model for ferromagnetism; percolation models transport in porous media. Rather surprisingly, the last three of these models have scaling limits (obtained by letting the lattice size tend to 0) that belong to a same one-parameter family of conformally invariant random curves, the Schramm-Loewner evolution. This stochastic process introduced in 1999 by Schramm has been at the center of many rigorous breakthroughs in statistical mechanics. This talk will be an overview of some of these.
Tue April 4th: Diana Hubbard (Brooklyn College)
Time: 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
In Person: 328 Ingersoll Extension
Title: Math and Cities
Abstract: We’ll think about how to measure distance in big cities like NYC, where we're only allowed to move around on the grid of city streets. We’ll even take a stab at some urban planning of our own. All are welcome, no matter your mathematical background.
Thur April 20, Diana Hubbard (Brooklyn College)
Time: 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
In Person: 1146 Ingersoll
Title: Topology - what's it good for?
Abstract: Draw any closed curve you like on a piece of paper. Does it contain four points that can be connected to form a square? This seemingly simple problem, called the “square peg problem”, was posed by the German mathematician Otto Toeplitz in 1911 and remains unsolved. In this talk I will discuss how the branch of mathematics called topology can help solve a similar problem: the so-called “rectangular peg problem”. As part of this discussion, we'll see how we can use topological objects to model mathematical questions that seem unrelated to topology.
Tue Apr 25, 2023: Jun Hu (Brooklyn College)
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
In Person: 1146 Ingersoll Hall
Title: Totally ramified rational functions and Speiser's graphs
Abstract: A rational function f (viewed as a map from the Riemann sphere to itself) is said to be totally ramified if for every critical value q, every preimage of q under f is a critical point. We use examples to show how such a rational function is related to a graph satisfying certain conditions (such graphs are called Speiser's graphs). Then we present results on the existence of such rational functions.
Thur, May 4: Heidi Goodson (Brooklyn College)
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
In Person: 1146 Ingersoll Hall
Title: Elliptic Curves over Finite Fields
Abstract: Elliptic curves are solution sets to cubic equations in two variables. Questions of how to find, count, and characterize points on elliptic curves have been studied since the days of Diophantus. Nearly 2000 years later, the great mathematician Joe Silverman wrote, "the theory of elliptic curves is rich, varied, and amazingly vast." In this talk, I will define what it means to be a point over a finite field and answer the question "How many?" I'll discuss estimates, exact values, and surprising trends as the order of the field varies.