Seminar Series

Abstract: JPEG is the silent engine that built the visual internet. While we use it every day, few realize it is a sophisticated tapestry of physics, human biology, and advanced mathematics. By exploiting the glitches in human perception, JPEG compression throws away data we never even knew was there. In this talk, we’ll take a high-altitude flight over the JPEG pipeline—from the Discrete Cosine Transform to psychovisual modeling. Join me to discover how we transform massive raw data into portable files, and why you’ll never look at a .jpg the same way again.

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January 16 (1p MT)

Speakers: Eugene Boman (Pennsylvania State University) and Robert Rogers (State University of New York, Fredonia)

Zoom Link: msu.zoom.us/j/94740679958

Passcode: Cardano

Abstract: The history of mathematics provides innumerable stories of mathematicians both famous and infamous, discovering, nearly discovering, and failing to discover deep and important results. These tales of discovery and near discovery are compelling at a purely human level. So too are descriptions of the quirks, foibles, fortunes, and personalities of individual mathematicians. These stories constitute the heritage of mathematics and it is our heritage that makes mathematics a relatable, very human discipline. Our common heritage should be used as much as possible to forge connections with, motivate, and pique the curiosity of our students. But most textbooks, if they use our heritage at all, use it quite ineffectively. For example, short historical vignettes sometimes appear as marginal notes, a clear indication to the student that they can, and possibly should be ignored. Which is unfortunate.

For the first several millenia of human existence a large component of education consisted of stories told and heard around a campfire. As a result storytelling is deeply embedded in the human psyche as a means of learning.

But the best stories are not told linearly. Some start in the middle, foreshadow future outcomes, and refer to past events with which the listener (or reader) is not yet familiar in order to build suspense, interest, and curiosity.

We have written two textbooks (and we're working on a third) where we have explicitly used mathematical heritage as the frame for the topics being taught. In the course of writing these books we found that we could also present the progression of mathematical ideas itself as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. We will discuss our efforts to use story-telling techniques as an effective teaching mode in our textbooks and classrooms without sacrificing the mathematics itself. 

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February 13 (1p MT)

Speaker: James Sellers (University of Minnesota, Duluth)

Title: Leonhard Euler’s Groundbreaking Work on Integer Partitions

Abstract: In the mid-18th century, Leonhard Euler single-handedly began the serious study of integer partitions and made fundamental contributions to the area for the next few decades. In particular, he proved a remarkable result which says that the number of partitions of the integer n into distinct parts equals the number of partitions of n into odd parts. My goal in this talk is to discuss Euler’s impressive work on partitions, including snapshots of historical (original) publications of Euler, and then to describe numerous 19th, 20th, and 21st century results which spring from Euler’s original result. The talk will be self-contained and geared towards anyone with an interest in mathematics.

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March 13 (1p MT)

Speaker: Dwight Anderson Williams II (Morgan State University)

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April 10 (1p MT)

Speaker: Dwight Anderson Williams II (Morgan State University)

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January 29 - Feb 2: Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM/ICM) (All AMP)

https://www.comap.com/contests/mcm-icm

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