Monday, 22 March 2021

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.

MEETINGS AND SEMINARS IN THE DEPARTMENT

Mondays

Combinatorics Seminar

TBA

Coordinator: Louis Shapiro

WEDNESDAYS

Math team/Math Club meetings

Please contact organizers for zoom link.

Organizers: Jill McGowan (math club), Lou Shapiro (math team)

Thursdays

Seminar on Topological Semigroups

To start, Dr. Justin Moore of Cornell will talk about some of his recent work.

Time Thursdays at 2pm. Seminar will meet using Zoom. Please contact coordinator for a link.

Coordinator Dennis Davenport

Graduate Student Seminar

Meeting from 4 to 5pm on Thursdays. Contact coordinator for link.

Coordinator: Noel Bourne

Fridays

Mathematics Department Colloquium

This semester our Colloquium talks are shared between us and Cornell's Colloquium.

Friday, March 26

Irina Gelbukh, Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Mexico

Topic: Topology of Reeb Graphs.

TALKS AND WORKSHOPS OUTSIDE DEPARTMENT

1. (Thanks to Marshall Cohen, Morgan State) Morgan State math colloquium

Special Mathematics Colloquium on Tuesday, March 23, 4pm.

Speaker: Larry Harper, University of California, Riverside

Title: “Is the Free Distributive Lattice (FD(n)) Sperner?”

2. (Thanks to Dennis Davenport)

a) Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology is happy to announce that our 37th annual Undergraduate Mathematics Conference will be held completely online April 23-24, 2021.

This conference is a great opportunity for undergraduate students to present their work, network with fellow math-interested students, and listen to excellent speakers. Class projects, independent projects, REU work, and senior theses all make suitable presentations. Undergraduate presenters coming from all areas of mathematics are welcomed. This year we are happy to feature excellent plenary talks from Erin Wolf Chambers of Saint Louis University and Carol Schumacher of Kenyon College. Titles and abstracts of their talks are available online.

More information about the conference.

b) MAA Virtual programs for professional development.

Schedule of upcoming workshops.

3. MAA Mathfest Aug 4-7, 2021, online

More details and registration.

4. The Office of Research will host an information session on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Evidence for Action Program on March 24th at 4PM ET.

Registration link for the session:

“Evidence for Action (E4A) is a signature program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that funds rigorously designed research that yields convincing findings regarding the population health, well-being, and equity impacts of specific policies, programs, and other interventions. After three years of working toward this mission we are developing and implementing new strategies for achieving it.”

In previous newsletters:

Tenth annual Underrepresented Students in Topology and Algebra Research Symposium (USTARS), April 29-30, 2021

QEM/NSF Talent Development and Innovation Sciences (TDIS) Summer Internship

David Blackwell summer research institute (Illinois; UCLA/Berkeley)

ANNOUNCEMENTS

1. Math Department Scholarship Day

Please mark your calendars for April 2, Friday, 4.10 to 5pm, for our annual scholarship day to encourage math majors.

2. Roberto de Leo writes: My article titled “The graph of the logistic map is a tower” joint work with Jim Yorke (UMD), has been accepted for publication in AIMS' journal "Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems".

This work is particularly dear to me. When I studied the logistic map as a student, a long time ago, I thought that everything was done about it and would have never thought I'd end up publishing about it, even less jointly with one of its biggest experts. But even more because, when I started working on it, we discussed it with Todd and he found the topic interesting enough to read some of the literature. In fact, in the geometry seminar he organized in Spring 2020, he started a series of beautiful presentations illustrating a non-trivial construction introduced by Milnor and Thurston to study 1-dimensional real dynamics, something I had asked him because that paper was very hard for me to understand. Too bad we did not have more time to work together about it.

He adds: "Let me add an interesting anecdote about this paper. One of the things my advisor taught me is to always give the due credits when publishing a paper. When we started writing this one, of course we were going to publish some picture of the bifurcation diagram of the Logistic map, one of the most iconic pictures in dynamical systems theory together with Mandelbrot's fractal. Hence, I started looking in the literature for the author(s). Oddly enough, I quickly found out that, so far, everybody included this picture (it appears in most dynamical systems books) without providing any quotation about it (only Strogatz, in his book "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos", does provide a quotation but it is a wrong one -- I contacted him and, after double checking, he admitted the error). I was very surprised -- it seems that Mandelbrot was right pushing so much for getting the credits for his fractal! Anyways, at that point I went to Jim and asked him who did it first. He told me: "I have no idea!" (it was at least 40 years ago), so he wrote to Robert May (the biologist that in 1976 wrote the celebrated paper "Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics") asking whether it was him. May answered him: "I thought it was you!", quite a funny email exchange! So I had to spend a long time going over all papers related to the logistic map between

1975 and 1985 and it turned out that, as I started suspecting soon, the authors were Jim Yorke himself jointly with E. Ott and C. Grebogi in 1982 (in a Physics paper, btw). So, in particular, this is the first paper were we finally give justice to the authors of one of the most well-known pictures of chaos theory. "

In previous newsletters:

Call for participation in MAA congress

SCHOLARSHIP AND FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES

(from various sources)

1. Opportunities with DoD diversity management center

March 26, Friday

Howard University, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Diversity Management Operations Center, presents "Taking the Pentagon to the People.” Don’t miss your chance to learn about employment opportunities within the Department of Defense (DoD)!

Students can meet with recruiters and hear about internships, scholarships, direct hiring programs, and more! Faculty and staff, come learn about research and grant programs, small business partnerships, and faculty leave and sabbatical programs within DoD. Undergrad to PhD students, faculty, and staff welcome! #TTPTTP21Howard

Registration and more information.

2. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. CZI is a philanthropy that funds and supports biomedical research via targeted grantmaking and open competitions for grant applicants in the specific scientific areas of single-cell biology (transcriptomics/genomics), neurodegeneration, biomedical imaging, computational biology, open science, and rare disease patient-driven research organizations. The ambitious long-term goal of CZI is to accelerate progress in science to make it possible to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of this century.

Please reference their Pediatrics Networks RFA to get a general sense for scope and requirements of the RFA. Additionally, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has a computational biology focused RFA that was launched on March 5th and closes March 30th.

Chan Zuckerberg Website.

3. Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship.

MMUF is the centerpiece of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s initiatives to increase diversity in the faculty ranks of institutions of higher learning.

This provides support, including travel funds and research stipends, for undergraduates interested in an academic career. Fellows are selected by Howard University for the grants awarded to the university. Interested students should contact Dr. Nikki Taylor by email at nikki.taylor@howard.edu.

In previous newsletters:

Ray Diversity Fellowships

MAA funding opportunities

Summer Lab Internships at DHS

INTERESTING ARTICLES AND WEBSITES

1. The first planet discovered through mathematical calculations

NASA’s Mars rover is busy, and pretty soon we will try the first helicopter flight on Mars. This might be a good time to learn how mathematics was instrumental in the discovery of Neptune.

2. Mathematician who is getting popular for her exploration of connections to culture and music

Sarah Hart : triangulating math, Mozart and music