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 spring, our colloquia are likely to be Thursdays at 4pm.
For last fall's colloquia, you can see the schedule here. For last year's colloquia, you can see the schedule here.
Dr. Rudy Rucker, from the
San Jose State University Department of Mathematics
Science fiction often serves as a kind of laboratory for thought
experiments. In this talk we'll focus on the theme of higher
dimensions. We'll start with Abbott's classic FLATLAND, and then get into
some of the speaker's own published higher-dimensional popular science and
science-fiction. Concepts discussed will include the hyperspherical
universe, wormholes to parallel words, and the structure of spacetime.
Dr. Eleanor Rieffel, from the
Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
In the early 1970's, Richard Feynman observed that certain quantum mechanical effects could not be simulated efficiently on a computer. This observation led to speculation that perhaps computation in general could be done more efficiently if it made use of quantum effects. But building computational machines, quantum computers, that used quantum mechanical effects proved tricky, and as no one was sure how to use quantum effects to speed up computation, the field developed slowly.
It wasn't until 1994, when Peter Shor surprised the world by describing a polynomial time quantum algorithm for factoring integers, that the field of quantum computing came into its own. It was so widely believed that no fast algorithm for factoring integers existed that many cryptography systems use the difficulty of factoring integers as the basis of their security. Peter Shor's work prompted a flurry of activity, both among experimentalists trying to build quantum computers and theoreticians trying to find other quantum algorithms.
This field is in its infancy, and its language is the language of mathematics, particularly linear algebra. The talk will begin with a discussion of basic quantum mechanics, including a live demo of quantum effects. Quantum computation will then be described, with particular emphasis on how quantum computers can be programmed and where their power comes from.
Zhang Fuji, from Xiamen University in the Fujan province of China
Recently we proved two conjuctures of I.Gutman on the tree with a perfect matching which has minimum energy.Furthermore the trees with perfect matching having large or small energies are also determined.
Dr. Roger Alperin, from the
San Jose State University Department of Mathematics
The modular group PSL_2(Z) is the group of integer matrices with
determinant 1 under a simple equivalence relation. This group has
a rich structure. I will discuss the group theoretic struture and
its action on the projective line.
Anar Ahmedov, an undergraduate student at CSU Fresno, will be speaking about Fermat's Last Theorem.
Dr. Douglas Burke, from the UNLV Department of Mathematics, will be speaking about the incompleteness of axiomatic mathematics.