Fall 2024
Tuesday, September 10th
Welcome Back Picnic
Faculty will grill hamburgers, hot dogs and veggie burgers
Noon
Rector Courtyard (Rain Location: Rector Atrium)
Lunch provided
Tuesday, October 15th
"Where Do I Go From Here?"
Presented by Professor McKay, Professor Ferland and Andrea Lazarus (Career Center)
In this chat they will discuss a wide variety of careers and opportunities for students majoring in mathematics and computer science. In addition, they will talk about graduate school options, internships, and REUs (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Specific information about our recent graduates will be provided.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided
Tuesday, October 29th
Dr. Gary Gordon and Dr. Liz McMahon, Lafayette College, authors of The Joy of SET
"Math in the Card Game SET"
The card game SET is played with a special deck of 81 cards. There is quite a lot of mathematics that can be explored using the game; understanding that mathematics enhances our appreciation for the game, and the game enhances our appreciation for the mathematics! We’ll look at questions in combinatorics, probability, and especially geometry, plus computer simulations. There's also a Daily Puzzle, and we have found some interesting things out about that. If you’d like some practice before the talk, go to https://www.setgame.com/set/puzzle.
Noon
Toom 115
Pizza provided
Tuesday, November 19th
Megan Triplett '25 - "A Red-Plus-4 Szlam-Li Coloring of the Plane Which Forbids Red Translates of a 2-Point Set: An Application of Tiling to the Chromatic Number of the Plane Problem"
The chromatic number of the plane problem, also called the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, asks for the minimum number of colors required to color the plane such that no two points at distance 1 from each other have the same color. The Szlam-Li lemma has linked this problem with that of a red-plus-k coloring which forbids translates of some l-point set into the red. Recent discoveries imply that if for R2, with Euclidean distance, if R2 is Szlam-Li red-plus-4 colored such that for some nonempty subset F of R2, no translate of F in R2 is all red, then |F | ≥ 2. Here, we give a Szlam-Li red-plus-4 coloring of R2 which forbids red translates of a 2-point set.
We will also briefly discuss other results from the 2024 Auburn University REU Program in Algebra and Discrete Mathematics in the realms of algebra and graph theory.
Pranav Mishra '25 - "Summarizing the transcriptomic landscape of a non-small cell lung cancer atlas via representative subset selection"
In this presentation, we demonstrate our application of feature-based subset selection algorithms to a large integrated non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) atlas of 186,223 cells profiled by single cell transcriptomic assays. In doing so, we select representative subsets of cells that make up 2% to 10% of the complete baseline dataset. Upon profiling the properties of these subsets, we show that our subsets are enriched in rare cell types and maintain the properties of the complete baseline dataset. Thus, we provide an approach that allows for the summarization of massive atlas-scale single-cell datasets into more computationally tractable subsets.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided