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Student Seminar

The Student Seminar is an informal organization consisting of graduate and undergraduate students who promote and engage in activities of mathematical interest. There are no dues, and attendance at meetings is open to current and prospective LSU students in any field. Students in the sciences regularly attend, and other majors are welcome.

The purpose of the Student Seminar is to develop and promote the bonds between graduates and undergraduates. This is a symbiotic relationship: the graduate student learns to communicate at a level appropriate for his or her future students and the undergraduate student learns an appreciation for mathematics outside of the usual curricula.

Meetings are scheduled at 5:00pm for graduate student speakers and at 3:30pm for professor speakers and held weekly in the Keisler Lounge on the third floor of Lockett. Pizza is always served.

For more information, please check the department's calendar.
Undergraduates can check the Undergradute Math Club Web Page.

Past Events:

Spring 2005

• February 7th: graduate student Moshe Cohen on the geometric insight of Magic Square Enumeration
• February 14th: graduate student Piotr Maciak on Functional Equations
• February 21st: professor Frank Neubrander on "Distance according to Elvis"
• February 28th: graduate student Michael Aristidou on "Consistency, Probability and Human Rationality"
  Classical consistency (as we know it in Math and Logic) cannot be a condition for human rationality. This can be shown from simple mathematical (or logical) problems that people fail to solve corretly, such as "Wason's Task" and "Linda's Paradox". Relaxing consistency conditions, which can be achieved by using Fuzzy Sets rather than Classical Sets, perhaps one could give a more realistic account of human rationality.
• March 7th: graduate student Martin Laubinger on "Card Shuffling"
  In "Proofs from THE BOOK," Martin Aigner and Gunter M. Ziegler discuss various methods of card shuffling, including top-in-at-random shuffles and riffle shuffles.
• March 14th: professor Bogdan Oporowski on Graph Theory
• March 21st: no talk; spring break
• March 28th: graduate student Matt Edmonds at 5:30pm *special time*
• April 4th: graduate student Natalia Ptitsyna on "Traffic Flow Along a Highway."
  Looking from an airplane at a freeway, one can visualize vehicular traffic as a stream or a continuum fluid. It seems therefore quite natural to associate traffic with fluid flow and treat it similarly. Because of this analogy, traffic is often described in terms of flow, concentration, and speed. In the fluid flow analogy, the traffic stream is treated as a one- dimensional compressible fluid. This leads to two basic assumptions (i) traffic flow is conserved; and (ii) there is a one-to-one relationship between speed and density or between flow and density. The first assumption is expressed by the conservation or continuity equation. It is an excellent way of introducing the mathematics and physics of shock waves, and the solutions can be readily interpreted in terms of our everyday experience of road travel.
• April 11th: professor Michael M. Tom on "Existence and Non-existence of nontrivial solitary-wave solutions for some nonlinear dispersive models."
  Review the question of nontrivial solitary wave solutions of some nonlinear dispersive models that includes the generalized K-DV and the generalized KP equations. These equations model the unidirectional propagation of small amplitude long waves in shallow water.
• April 18th: undergraduate student Miao Xu on the results from his Research Experience for Undergraduates last summer, where he investigated graph theory and inverse problems.
  Very generally, connectivity types deals with the set of connections of a graph G = (V,E). Given a graph G, we can find its connectivity type by counting the number and different types of connections it possesses. However, a more intrinsic quality is whether we can find a basis of connections that spans a larger set of connections within this graph, and if so, how many elements need to be in this basis to span the set. A connection is a path between boundary vertices on graph G (Boundary because we are dealing with a circular planar graph, where we have boundary vertices on the boundary of the circle, and interior vertices in the interior of the circle). Finally, the number of elements in this basis works out to nicely related to the dimension of the graph G, where by dimension I mean the number of edges of G. In algebraic topology this is called a complete intersection.
• April 25th: graduate student Debra Czarneski '05 on "The Zeta Functions of Graphs."
  Undergraduate officer elections were held, as well.