Colloquia 2012-2013
Mathematics Colloquium
All colloquia are on Fridays at 4:00 pm in Van Vleck B239, unless otherwise indicated.
Fall 2010
| date | speaker | title | host(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| sept 3 | Timo Seppalainen (Madison) | Scaling exponents for a 1+1 dimensional directed polymer | local |
| sept 10 | Moe Hirsch (Madison) | Actions of Lie groups and Lie algebras on manifolds | local |
| sept 17 | Uri Andrews (Madison) | Computable stability theory | local |
| sept 24 | Margo Anderson (UW-Milwaukee) | The politics of numbers | Jordan (Math and... seminar) |
| oct 1 | Matthew Finn (U. of Adelaide) | Hot spots | Jean-Luc |
| wed oct 6 | Robert Krasny (U. of Michigan) | Computing vortex sheet motion | Shi |
| oct 8 | Anita Wager (Madison) | Bridging In and Out-of-School Mathematics: A Framework for Incorporating Students' Culture | Steffen |
| oct 15 | Felipe Voloch (U. Texas Austin) | Local-Global principles for integral points on curves | Nigel |
| oct 22 | Markus Banagl (U. Heidelberg) | On the Stability of Intersection Space Cohomology Under Deformation of Singularities | Maxim |
| nov 5 | Tom Hales (Pittsburgh) | TBA | Nigel (Distinguished lecture) |
| nov 12 | Greg Buck (St. Anselm) | TBA | Jean-Luc |
| nov 19 | Jeff Xia (Northwestern) | TBA | Shi |
| wed dec 1 | Peter Markowich (Cambridge and Vienna) | TBA | Shi (Wasow Lecture) |
| dec 10 | Benson Farb (Chicago) | TBA | Jean-Luc |
Abstracts
Robert Krasny Computing Vortex Sheet Motion
Vortex sheets are used in fluid dynamics to model thin shear layers in slightly viscous flow. Examples include a mixing layer subject to Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and the trailing wake of an aircraft. One of the earliest simulations in computational fluid dynamics used the point vortex method to compute vortex sheet motion and the results seemed to confirm Prandtl's idea that vortex sheets roll up smoothly into concentrated spirals. However, later simulations with higher resolution encountered difficulty due to the fact that the initial value problem is ill-posed and a singularity forms at a finite time from smooth initial data. I'll describe the fundamental contributions on this topic by Louis Rosenhead, Garrett Birkhoff, and Derek Moore, and then discuss more recent regularized simulations past the critical time. The results support a conjecture by Dale Pullin on self-similarity, but chaotic dynamics intervenes unexpectedly. Finally I'll describe a new panel method for vortex sheet motion in 3D flow which uses a treecode to gain efficiency. A simulation of vortex ring dynamics will be shown and an application of the treecode in molecular dynamics will be briefly indicated.
Anita Wager Bridging In and Out-of-School Mathematics: A Framework for Incorporating Students' Culture
This presentation will examine a professional development designed to explore a broadened notion of teaching for understanding that considers the cultural and socio-political contexts in which children live and learn. The goal of the study was to identify how teachers, in the process of learning to consider their mathematics pedagogy through an equity lens, construed the relationships among mathematics achievement and culture. An analysis of the features teachers focused on when they incorporated the ideas of mathematics teaching for understanding with students' out-of-school mathematical knowledge revealed four related practices: (a) identifying embedded mathematical practices prominent in contexts, (b) addressing cultural activities using school mathematics, (c) creating teacher initiated situated settings, and (d) using cultural contexts for problems. The practices provide a framework to address an ongoing issue in mathematics education: how to incorporate students out-of-school experiences in the classroom.