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?
- Tue June 19: Sohail Farhangi, What is the Continued Fraction Factoring Method? [pdf]
- Thu June 21: Vilus Winstein, What is the Recursion Theorem?
- Tue June 26: Austin Antoniou, What is the Davenport Constant?
- Thu June 28: Desmond Coles, What is Moonshine?
- Tue July 3: James Enouen,
- Thu July 5: Megan Fava,
- Tue July 10: Jake Huryn,
- Thu July 12:
- Tue July 17: Alex Beckwith,
- Thu July 19:
- Tue July 24:
- Thu July 26:
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.
[pdf] - Some links on this page are to .pdf files. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact webmaster@math.osu.edu . PDF files require the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader software to open them. If you do not have Reader, you may use the following link to Adobe to download it for free at: Adobe Acrobat Reader.