Math Dept 2023-24 Newsletter 6
Monday, 4 December 2023
Past newsletters can now be reached via the department website.
[Click on “About” and then “News and Events”].
Newsletter is sent out when there is something new.
Please send entries by the end of the workweek–Ed.
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Happy holidays everyone ! See you in the spring semester – Ed.
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MEETINGS AND SEMINARS IN THE DEPARTMENT
AMS Eastern Sectional Meetings, April 6-7, 2024
Our department will host this spring's AMS sectional meetings.
TUESDAYS
Seminar on Topological Semigroups
The seminars will include applications to Ramsey theory.
Seminars will resume in the spring semester.
Dilip Raghavan of the National University of Singapore is talking about Borel order dimension.
Contact coordinator for zoom invite.
Coordinator Dennis Davenport
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Combinatorics Seminar
Contact coordinator Lou Shapiro for zoom link.
WEDNESDAYS
Applied Math Reading Seminar
Coordinator: Katie Gursky, Yeona Kang
Number Theory Seminar
Seminars will resume in the spring.
Wednesdays at 3.30pm, on zoom.
Contact coordinators for zoom link.
Francois Ramaroson is talking about Holm curves (a type of elliptic curve).
Coordinators: Francois Ramaroson and Sankar Sitaraman
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Math team/Math Club meetings
Organizer: Jill McGowan
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FRIDAYS
Undergraduate Math Seminar
Fridays, 2:45 -3pm, room 210, Annex 3. Seminars will resume in the spring.
There will be pizza and refreshments. On friday November 17 students working with Dewayne Dixon spoke on Application of Symmetric Groups with AI Image Processing and students working with Joon Ha spoke on Glucose Challenge test-Novel Cluster of Type 2 Diabetes-Parameter Fitting and Clinical Validation. Brief descriptions of the research by the two groups below, under Announcements.
Graduate Student Seminar
3pm, friday, room 213 and on zoom. Seminars will resume in the spring.
On Friday, Nov 17, John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab Professor Dr. Zerotti Woods talked about "Open Questions in The Field of Artificial Intelligence of Interest to National Security."
Contact Shakuan Frankson for more information.
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Mathematics Department Colloquium
Fridays, 4.10 to 5pm. Room 213 and zoom. Seminars will resume in the spring.
The colloquium schedule and videos are available at this website: https://deleo.website/HU/colloquium.html
TALKS AND WORKSHOPS OUTSIDE DEPARTMENT
In previous newsletters
55th Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory & Computing March 4-8, 2024.
Infinite Possibilities Conference, April 18-20, 2024
Southeastern Atlantic regional conference on differential equations (SEARCDE)
ANNOUNCEMENTS
1. Undergraduate Research in the Department
Joon Ha writes about his students' research:
Diabetes studies funded by an NIH grant
In the Fall of 2023, a cohort of 14 undergraduate students, representing diverse majors including mathematics, mechanical engineering, computer science, biology, sports medicine, and history, enrolled in undergraduate research course. These students have learned the fundamentals of endocrine systems focused on glucose metabolism, basic statistical methods, the statistical package R, and fitting a mathematical model of diabetes to clinical data. Building on this foundational knowledge, the students have conducted group research projects tailored to their academic backgrounds and personal preferences: 1) Biology oriented work; 2) Statistical analyses of clinical data; 3) Parameter fitting algorithm; 4) Methods of clinical experiments; 5) Clustering. Students have presented their works at the math dept. undergraduate seminar, 11/3/2023 and 11/17/2023. These presentations provided a platform for the students to share their research findings and insights as well as opportunity to introduce our mathematics department to students who have diverse background. A special acknowledgment is extended to Dr. Toni, whose unwavering support was instrumental in the success of the research course. Dr. Toni played a pivotal role in student recruitment, organization of seminars, and provided valuable feedback during presentations.
Dewayne Dixon's group:
Applications of Symmetric Groups with Image Processing
This presentation delves into symmetric group theory and the basics of CNNs before exploring the results of our research project integrating symmetric groups into AI. The research project investigates a potential application of group theory, specifically symmetric groups, in machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for image identification, focusing on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision. CNNs, crucial in image classification and visual recognition tasks, have transformed computer vision, but applications require large amounts of data and are limited in scope. By applying symmetric transformations on the training dataset, the study examines the effects of these transformations on the training and test performance of CNNs, focusing primarily on AlexNet and a Custom Structure. AlexNet is a very popular, robust CNN architecture capable of classifying up to 1000 categories, and the Custom architecture is a relatively simple and lightweight structure.
Students involved in this project were Acheampong, D., Caesar, N., Carter, J., Mackie, M., Midgette, A., Hamilton, J. Jennings, S., Richardson, K., Williams, Z.
SCHOLARSHIP AND FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
(from various sources)
1. Undergraduate Internships at Atomic Physics Lab
U.S. CMS is excited to announce the next edition of the RENEW-HEP USCMS SPRINT/ USCMS PURSUE combined undergraduate internship program. The internship program is intended to address the under-representation of women and minority students in STEM fields and is open to students pursuing physics, engineering, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, and related fields. The program is sponsored by the Department of Energy (RENEW-HEP: USCMS SPRINT A Scholars Program for Research Internship) and the National Science Foundation USCMS Operations (USCMS PURSUE: Program for Undergraduate Research Summer Experience). The student internship program is offered and administered through Tougaloo College, in collaboration with Brown University, University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, and University of Wisconsin-Madison. See the program Website for more.
2. Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at UAB
University of Alabama, Birmingham is offering National Science Foundation (NSF) supported Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in "Experimental and Computational Materials Research.” The program takes place May 19 through July 26, 2024. REU-projects are available in five research clusters: (1) computational materials research/machine learning (2) materials under extreme conditions (3) materials for energy applications, (4) materials for sensors and laser applications, and (5) biomaterials for implants, tissue engineering and drug delivery applications. This is an in-person research model. The undergraduates will conduct the analysis of data generated in their research projects and make presentations on completed research to faculty mentors and other undergraduates taking part in this program.
The application will be available online December 1, 2023, through midnight April 1, 2024. Go to this website.
3. DOE scholarships for STEM students
Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Environmental Management (EM) Success Through Academic and Research Scholarship (STARS) program provides opportunities for undergraduate students from Minority Serving Institutions pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
4. Other opportunities at Federal labs:
In previous newsletters:
DOE's Computational Science Graduate Fellowship
University of Massachusetts, Amherst graduate fellowship
Fellowships for students and faculty at DHS
INTERESTING ARTICLES AND WEBSITES
1. The Math behind ancient sand drawing techniques in the Pacific Islands
A researcher finds concepts and ideas from Graph Theory behind sand drawing art in Vanuatu islands in the Pacific Ocean.
2. A century later, new techniques reconcile General Relativity for small masses
Around 1980 mathematicians proved, as part of a major theorem in general relativity, that an isolated physical system, or space, without any mass in it must be flat. This left unresolved the question of what a space looks like if it is almost a vacuum, having just a tiny amount of mass. Is it necessarily almost flat? Conghan Dong, a graduate student at SUNY Stony Brook and Antoine Dong of CalTech have proved that space converges to flatness.