Month: February 2016

This week in math club graduate student Isabelle Beaudry will discuss inference with social network data with applications in public health. We meet 5 – 6pm Wednesday, February 24th in LGRT 1528. Pizza and soda will be provided.

Isabelle’s abstract
Estimating disease prevalence among human populations is crucial for public health surveillance. In some settings however, we don’t have a list of individuals in the population of interest. In this talk, I will discuss a sampling technique which alleviates this problem by using social networks. I will therefore introduce some mathematical representation of social networks, follow with a description of Markov chains on the network nodes and finish with a brief introduction to prevalence estimation.

The UMass undergraduate Math Club will meet this Wednesday, 2/3, 5-6pm in LGRT 1528. This week our own club co-organizer and pizza wrangler Dan Nichols will tell us about… groups!

Dan Nichols will give a quick tour of the area of mathematics known as group theory, focusing on geometric and combinatorial perspectives and on applications outside pure mathematics. The talk will be quite accessible to calculus students, but it should also be relevant even to those who have already taken an abstract algebra class.

We’ll have the pizza. And also the math. So we hope to see you there!

Join us tonight for the return of Richard Buckman and his perplexing puzzles (that he scrapes off of the internet). We’ll hang out, eat pizza, imbibe soda, and work on puzzles, from 5-6 pm in LGRT 1528. Unwind from all that math! Or bug Rich, Dan, and Andrew about interesting math, while we struggle to complete logic puzzles like cave, slitherlink, statue park, the Riemann hypothesis, and the smooth Poincaré conjecture in dimension 4. Maybe not those last two, tonight…

The UMass undergraduate Math Club will meet this Wednesday, 2/3, 5-6pm in LGRT 1528. This week, UMass grad student Mark Lowell will discuss basic techniques for modeling populations of wild animals using ordinary differential equations, including exponential and logistic models, the Lotka-Volterra equations, the May-Leonard equations, and cellular automata.

As usual, we’ll bring the pizza and soda if you bring yourselves and your nerdgoggles enthusiasm.