Fall '09
This semester we meet every Wednesday at 4 p.m. in
EH 3866. If you you would like to give a talk or want more
information email Kris at
kgre@umich.edu
Upcoming Talk
Future Talks
Previous Talks
Planning Meeting
Location and Time: EH 3096. Tuesday, Sep 15, 4-5 p.m.
This will be a planning meeting for the Fall semester. We will discuss:
- Topics for the semester -- cool mathematics that you have
heard about and want to learn more about (so bring some ideas);
- Starting a student SIAM chapter here in Michigan;
- Reserving slots for giving a talk.
Please don't hesitate to join us if you are interested in seeing how
mathematics gets applied to the real world. All are welcome.
The MAGMA Computer Algebra System and Planar Graph Coloring
Kris Reyes
Location and Time: EH 3866, Wednesday, Sep 23, 4-5 p.m.
I will talk about the MAGMA Computer Algebra System, including
how to access and run it, and some basic MAGMA syntax. I will then
investigate how the problem of finding nowhere-zero k-flows
in graphs, which is related to planar graph coloring. I shall follow
paper 15 in "Discovering Mathematics with MAGMA." This talk should
be relevant to anyone interested computational discrete mathematics.
A Primer on Stochastic Calculus
Jeremy West
Location and Time: EH 3866, Wednesday, Sep. 30, 4-5 p.m.
A Brief Introduction of the Mathematics of Finance
Matthew Masarik
Location and Time: EH 3866, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 4-5 p.m.
In this talk, we will introduce some of the basic ideas involved in mathematical finance. We
will begin with a brief discussion of financial markets and derivative securities, and the rest
of our talk will focus on methods to price these securities. In particular, we will mention the
fundamental theorem of asset pricing, the binomial model, and then we will derive and solve the
celebrated Black-Scholes PDE for a simple European call option on an asset paying no dividends.
Mathematics of Climate Change
Jared Whitehead
EH 3866, Wednesday, Oct. 21. 4-5 p.m.
This talk is meant to be an opening to dialogue on how mathematicians can
involve themselves in the science of climate change. If there is enough
interest, the talk could go any number of directions, but here is the plan.
One of the most pressing issues our society faces is the impact we have on
our planet. Accurate predictions of the future climate are vital for
policy makers and social scientists. Difficult decisions regarding
resource allocation, disaster management, and urban planning must be made
keeping in mind what a future earth will be like. Massive computational
models have been developed at several centers throughout the world to
simulate the earth's climate. These General Circulation Models (GCM) are
then used to forecast the conditions of the earth's climate in the future.
These GCM's are not perfect however, and there are a plethora of
mathematical issues one can raise with each individual model. After
briefly describing several mathematical problems in climate change, I will
point out a few particular issues that are of interest to myself in fluid
dynamics.
Image Segmentation via Graph Cuts
Matt Elsey
EH 3866, Wednesday, Oct. 28. 4-5 p.m.
I will introduce some of the common problems in image processing and
give a brief overview of some of the common approaches to solving
these problems. Then I will specialize to the problem of image
segmentation and a variant of the piecewise-constant Mumford-Shah
(PCMS) model. I'll link this problem to the problem of finding a
minimum capacity cut (MC) in a flow network. The max-flow min-cut
problem allows us to reduce the (MC) problem to find a maximum flow
(MF) on the same network, which can often be solved in polynomial
time. I'll conclude by demonstrating a simple MATLAB implementation to
solve (PCMS) via (MF). No prior experience with either image
processing models or graphs is presumed.
Linear Programming
Chandler Wu
EH 3866, Wednesday, Nov. 11. 4-5 p.m.
Linear Programming is the corner stone of Operations Research. In this
talk, I will give a brief introduction to formulation of Linear
optimization problems, the simplex method, duality theory and some of their
applications on network flow problem.