Math Department Colloquia

The Math Department Colloquia are a series of talks intended for a general audience. Everyone is encouraged to attend and the talks are directed at people who have a reasonable comprehension of the topics in undergraduate mathematics. Come meet our undergraduates, graduate students and faculty as well as our distinguished guest speakers.

For this fall, our colloquia are likely to be Monday afternoons at 3pm or Thursdays at 3pm.

For last year's colloquia, you can see the schedule here.

Math Colloq

Dividing Polygons by Lines

Thursday, December 4, 3:10-4:00p.m. San Ramon 6, Room 6

Dr. Steve Chiappari, from the Santa Clara University Department of Mathematics will be talking about ``Dividing Polygons by Lines''.

Given a polygon, one may divide its interior into subregions by line segments emanating from vertices and passing through a point interior to a side. In this talk we discuss two related problems concerning the maximal number of such subregions possible under various conditions. In each case we produce a polygon with the maximal number of subregions.

The Proof: Fermat's Last Theorem Video Presentation

Thursday, November 13, 3:10-4:00p.m. San Ramon 6, Room 6

This video documentary film covers some of the history and flavor of Andrew Wiles proof of the famous conjecture known as Fermat's Last Theorem. Many mathematicians in the last 350 years have tried to prove or disprove Fermat's last theorem, which is that x^n+y^n=z^n has no positive integer solutions for n>2. Pierre de Fermat stated this as a theorem but did not provided a proof and the simplicity and history of the problem has attracted attention for the following 350 years. The video is not a technical descripition of the proof itself, which is very complex, but instead describes some of the personalities, interactions and emotions felt by those involved in completing the proof. See the Nova website for more info. Free popcorn and soda!

Joint Math/Physics Colloq

Science After the Wall

3:10pm Monday, November 10 in Science 143

Wolfgang Fritzsche, will be speaking on "Science after the Wall". Dr. Fritzsche is from what used to be East Germany and will be speaking about some aspects of the changes German reunification has had on science there.

Continued Fractions and Algebraic Numbers

3:10pm Thursday, October 23 in San Ramon 6, Room 6

Dr. Glenn Appleby, from the Santa Clara University Department of Mathematics will be talking about continued fractions.

Abstract: I will describe a not-often-enough studied branch of mathematics called Continued Fraction representations of numbers. This is a different way of writing down real numbers that is similar to, but distinct from, decimal expansions. We will use these representations to study what sort of numbers are out there and how we can tell them apart.