The What is ...? seminar will run again in Summer 2018. Professors Vitaly Bergelson and Daniel Shapiro serve as coordinators/mediators.
The seminar's main goal is to expose culturally ambitious participants to some mathematical notions not taught in standard courses. These topics form an important part of mathematical folklore, and may prove useful for doing research and enhancing teaching.
Lectures will be given mostly by graduate and undergraduate student participants.
2018 Talks
We will meet in Scott Lab N054 on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4:00 during the Summer Semester.
- Tue June 12: Andreu Ferre-Moragues, What is the Müntz-Szász Theorem? [pdf]
- Thu June 14: Will Hoffer, What is the Yang-Baxter Equation? [pdf]
- Tue June 19: Sohail Farhangi, What is the Continued Fraction Factoring Method? [pdf]
- Thu June 21: Vilas Winstein, What is the Recursion Theorem? [pdf]
- Tue June 26: Austin Antoniou, What is the Davenport Constant? [pdf]
- Thu June 28: Desmond Coles, What is Moonshine? [pdf]
- Tue July 3: James Enouen, What is the Markov and Lagrange Spectra? [pdf]
- Thu July 5: Megan Fava, What is Game Theory? [pdf]
- Tue July 10: Jake Huryn, What is FRACTRAN? [pdf]
- Thu July 12: Ishann Shah, What is Quantum Mechanics? [pdf]
- Tue July 17: Alex Beckwith, What is the Erdős–Kac theorem? [pdf]
- Thu July 19: Ethan Ackelsberg, What is the Arcsine Law? [pdf]
- Tue July 24: Josiah Oh, What is the Toeplitz Conjecture? [pdf]
- Thu July 26: Peter Huston, What is the Perron-Frobenius theorem? [pdf]
Previous What is ...? talks
2017
- Tue June 20: Caleb Dilsavor, What is Luroth Expansion? [pdf]
- Thu June 22: Maxwell Budd, What are Rademacher Functions? [pdf]
- Tue June 27: Nik Henderson,
What is a Weierstrass Point? [pdf] - Thu June 29: Aidan Howells, What are Cassini Ovals? [pdf]
- Thu July 6: Sohail Farhangi, What is an Engel series? [pdf]
- Tue July 11: Dan Brogan, What is an Attractor? [pdf]
- Thu July 13: Joshua Yee, What is Topological Entropy? [pdf]
- Tue July 18: Miles Calabresi, What is Crofton's Formula? [pdf]
- Thu July 20, Vilas Winstein, What is the Lambda Calculus? [pdf]
- Tue July 25, Joseph Vandehey, What is the Hot Spot Theorem? [pdf]
Early talks can be found at What is ...? Seminar Previous Talks.
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