Fall 2018 colloquia

Colloquium talks this fall will be held in FLN 2.02.02 Fridays 4:00–5:00pm.

• Friday 12 October
  Yannick Sire (Johns Hopkins University).
  Nonlocal problems: from physics to geometry.
  
  Show abstract
  I will describe a variety of nonlocal equations describing several phenomena related to turbulence, quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics or statistical physics. By many means, nonlocal terms are more relevant in these areas than local ones. On the other hand, the fractional laplacian is a well-known object in mathematical analysis such as harmonic analysis, geometric analysis or probabilities.
  I will give an overview of the current state of the art in a bunch of selected topics, emphasizing on differences between local and nonlocal phenomena.
  
• Friday 26 October
  Rebecca Dibbs (Texas A&M University at Commerce)
  Patching the pipeline: Increasing the flow of STEM majors.
  
  Show abstract
  In the next decade, STEM jobs will exceed STEM graduates by approximately one million. Hence, institutions should endeavor to recruit and retain more STEM majors. Since most undergraduates decide whether or not to stay in a STEM major between Calculus I and Calculus II, improving the instruction of these courses should help to retain majors. However, since students make the decision of whether or not to pursue STEM careers in early high school, recruiting efforts begin in the Algebra I classroom. This talk will discuss how CLEAR Calculus, formative assessment, and the learning assistant model support undergraduate learning and increase STEM major retention. The efforts to improve algebra instruction and STEM major recruitment by using Swivl robots and infusing physics and schema-based instruction to the Algebra I classes will also be presented.
  
• Friday 2 November
  E. Cabral Balreira (Trinity University)
  Geometric methods for global stability and monotonicity.
  
  Show abstract
  It is an important problem in discrete dynamics to determine when local stability of fixed points implies global stability. We will focus on the planar Ricker competition model and introduce ideas from singularity theory to describe the dynamics of the images of the critical curves to show that local stability of the coexistence (positive) fixed point implies global stability. The introduction of geometric methods will allow us to revisit the notion of monotonicity and develop a geometric generalization for the notion of monotonicity (or competitive) maps in higher dimensions. We show that this definition is equivalent for known results for planar maps and provide analytic conditions to check for geometric monotonicity and global stability. We illustrate our results with the Beverton-Holt and Ricker competition map.
• Friday 16 November
  Milos Savic (University of Oklahoma)
  Fostering Mathematical Creativity in a Classroom and its Effects.
  
  Show abstract
  Mathematical creativity is often discussed amongst mathematicians, but is not as common in undergraduate settings. Our Creativity Research Group is examining creativity in the undergraduate classroom, particularly the ways that creativity is explicitly fostered and the effects of such a pedagogy on students. In this talk, I will demonstrate our findings by immersing the audience in such a course, interacting while highlighting our research. I conclude by offering and soliciting conjectures about creativity in the classroom.
  One can see our work by viewing the website www.creativityresearchgroup.com.
  
• Friday 30 November
  James Hiebert (University of Delaware)
  Designing Systems for Continuously Improving University Mathematics Courses
  Show abstract
  There are no quick fixes to improving the quality of mathematics teaching – in schools or in universities. With the hindsight of 17 years of steady work, the mathematics education group at the University of Delaware can identify several decisions that have been crucial for improving its mathematics courses for pre-service teachers. A number of these decisions were not predicted based on the research literature or the culture of teaching in the U.S. I will describe these decisions and show the long-term benefits of relentlessly pursuing incremental evidence-based improvements in the quality of mathematics instruction.
• Friday 7 December
  Michael Hott (UT Austin)
  A simple recipe for deriving the Hartree equation
  Show abstract
  Starting with the full N-body Schrödinger equation for a weakly-interacting system of identical Bosons, we want to derive the Hartree equation in the mean-field limit. This in turn provides the persistence of Bose-Einstein condensation. We will show how to control different parameters in the derivation.