Past Special Events
Summer 2021 Events
Our first meeting will be Thursday June 3 at 6PM. We will be listening to the Mathematically Uncensored podcast and discussing together, starting with Episode 1: Our People, Our Culture, Our Mathematics. We will meet every two weeks during the summer!
Zoom ID: 95841222909
Password: our organization's acronym in all caps.
Spring 2021 Events
This event is scheduled for Thursday January 28 at 5:30 - 7:00 PM CST. The Zoom link can be found here. The Meeting ID is 976 8332 9123.
Stay afterwards for a MoCAT Mixer to meet with us and talk about the new semester!
This semester, we are inviting the UT Austin math department (undergrads, grads, faculty, etc.) to discuss the AMS Publication Living Proof. This book is a collection of 41 short essays where mathematicians share their struggles and stories. We will meet every two weeks beginning Thursday Feb. 4th at 5:30pm via Zoom.
For more details, click here.
Dr. Anthony Várilly-Alvarado of Rice University will be giving the Distinguished Mathematicians of Color Colloquium Series on April 5th, 2021 at 4pm. The Zoom Meeting ID is 935 7020 8579.
Title: Perfect Cuboids and Magic Squares of Squares
Abstract: A perfect cuboid is a box such that the distance between any two corners is a positive integer. A magic square is a grid filled with distinct positive integers, whose rows, columns, and diagonals add up to the same number. To date, we don't know if there exists a perfect cuboid, or a 3 x 3 magic square whose entries are distinct squares. What do these problems have in common? Secretly, they are both problems about rational points on algebraic surfaces of general type. I believe there is no such thing as a perfect cuboid or a 3 x 3 magic square of squares, and I will try to convince you that geometry suggests this is so.
He will also be speaking at the Geometry Seminar on April 8th, 2021 at 3:30pm. The Zoom Meeting ID is 957 4704 4617.
Pizza Seminar
Spring 2021, Thursday, April 1 at 5:30pm
Dr. Michail Savvas joins us from California to discuss the background material for Dr. Villáry-Alvarado’s upcoming talks in the Distinguished Mathematicians of Color Colloquium and Geometry seminar.
The event will take place on Zoom. The meeting link is posted on our Discord server.
MoCAT Puzzle Night
We're hosting a puzzle night this Thursday, April 15th at 5:30pm! You can join us to solve some math "puzzles." These puzzles were hand-picked to require no math knowledge (beyond high school math), but still be challenging! Here's an example puzzle to keep you busy until Thursday:
The 15 Game
To play this game, two players take turns to choose a whole number between 1 to 9, inclusive. Each number can only be chosen once.
The player that first collects a set of exactly 3 numbers that add up to 15 is the winner! If all the numbers have been chosen and none of the players has a set of exactly 3 numbers that add up to 15, then it is a draw.
Is there a winning strategy? (That is, can the first player always win?)
Or is there a way that the second player can always force a tie?
The event will take place on Gather Town. The link will be posted on our Discord server.
Fall 2020 Events
UT Austin Math Department Preview
We are working with the UT Austin Department of Mathematics to host a virtual preview of our graduate program on December 5th at 2pm CST. This event is designed for students applying to start graduate school in Fall 2021. Anyone is welcome and underrepresented students are especially encouraged to attend.
For more details, click here.
LaTeX Workshop: CVs, Cover Letters, and SOPs
Grad student Richard Wong will host a LaTeX workshop on how to make your application materials look nice. In particular, we will provide a number of sample LaTeX files for you to use and play with. This event will be held Friday Nov. 20th at 6:00pm on Discord.
Distinguished Mathematician of Color Colloquium Series
Dr. Wilfrid Gangbo of UCLA will be the first speaker of the Distinguished Mathematician of Color Colloquium Series on Thursday Nov. 5th at 4:30pm over Zoom. There will be an introductory talk by grad student Dan Weser on Friday Oct. 30th at 6:00pm on Discord.
See the Events page for more information!
LaTeX Workshop: What, Why, and How
Grad student Arun Debray will host an introductory LaTeX workshop. LaTeX, a piece of software for typesetting math documents, is all but essential for mathematicians, yet can be hard to learn. In this talk, I'll explain how to get started with LaTeX: what resources to use when learning or writing and how to do simple and important things in LaTeX. Hopefully, this talk will serve as a useful starting point for students who want to typeset things such as problem sets in LaTeX. This event will be held Friday Sep. 18th at 6:00pm on Discord.