AMS Student Chapter Seminar

The AMS Student Chapter Seminar (aka Donut Seminar) is an informal, graduate student seminar on a wide range of mathematical topics. The goal of the seminar is to promote community building and give graduate students an opportunity to communicate fun, accessible math to their peers in a stress-free (but not sugar-free) environment. Pastries (usually donuts) will be provided.

• When: Wednesdays, 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
• Where: Van Vleck, 9th floor lounge (unless otherwise announced)
• Organizers: Yandi Wu, Maya Banks

Everyone is welcome to give a talk. To sign up, please contact one of the organizers with a title and abstract. Talks are 25 minutes long and should avoid assuming significant mathematical background beyond first-year graduate courses.

The schedule of talks from past semesters can be found here.

Fall 2021

September 29, John Cobb

Title: Rooms on a Sphere

Abstract: A classic combinatorial lemma becomes very simple to state and prove when on the surface of a sphere, leading to easy constructive proofs of some other well known theorems.

October 6, Karan Srivastava

Title: An 'almost impossible' puzzle and group theory

Abstract: You're given a chessboard with a randomly oriented coin on every square and a key hidden under one of them; player one knows where the key is and flips a single coin; player 2, using only the information of the new coin arrangement must determine where the key is. Is there a winning strategy? In this talk, we will explore this classic puzzle in a more generalized context, with n squares and d sided dice on every square. We'll see when the game is solvable and in doing so, see how the answer relies on group theory and the existence of certain groups.

October 13, John Yin

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

October 20, Varun Gudibanda

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

October 27, Andrew Krenz

Title: The 3-sphere via the Hopf fibration

Abstract: The Hopf fibration is a map from $S^3$ to $S^2$. The preimage (or fiber) of every point under this map is a copy of $S^1$. In this talk I will explain exactly how these circles “fit together” inside the 3-sphere. Along the way we’ll discover some other interesting facts in some hands-on demonstrations using paper and scissors. If there is time I hope to also relate our new understanding of $S^3$ to some other familiar models.

November 3, Asvin G

Title: Probabilistic methods in math

Abstract: I'll explain how you can provr that something has to be true because it's probably true in a couple of examples. One of the proofs is by Erdos on the "sum set problem" and it is a proof that "only an alien could have come up with" according to a friend.

November 10, Ivan Aidun

Title: Intersection Permutations

Abstract: During a boring meeting, your buddy slips you a Paris metro ticket with this cryptic diagram (see left).

What could it mean?  The only way to find out is to come to this Donut Talk!

December 1, Yuxi Han

Title: Homocidal Chaffeur Problem

Abstract: I will briefly introduce the canonical example of differential games, called the homicidal chauffeur problem and how to use PDE to run down pedestrians optimally.

December 8, Owen Goff

Title: The Mathematics of Cribbage

Abstract: Cribbage is a card game that I have played many times over the years, that involves, among other things, finding subsets of set of numbers that equal a specific value (in the game that value is 15). In this donut talk I will attempt to use the power of combinatorics to find the optimal strategy for this game, particularly to solve one problem -- is there a way you can guarantee yourself at least one extra point by adding an additional card to your set?

Spring 2023

January 25, Michael Jeserum

Title: Totally Realistic Supply Chains

Abstract: Inspired by a group of fifth and sixth graders, we'll embark on a journey to discover how supply chains definitely work in real life. Along the way, we'll eat donuts, learn about graphs and the magical world of chip-firing, and maybe even make new friends!

February 1, Summer al-Hamdani

Title: Monkeying Around: On the Infinite Monkey Theorem

Abstract: Will monkeys keyboard bashing eventually type all of Hamlet? Yes, almost surely. We will discuss the history and proof of the infinite monkey theorem.

February 8, Dionel Jaime

Title: The weird world of polynomial curve fitting.

Abstract: You have some continuous function, and you decide you want to find a polynomial curve that looks a lot like your function. That is a very smart and easy thing to do. Nothing will go wrong.

February 15, Sun Woo Park

Speaker: Sun Woo Park

Title: What I did in my military service (Universal covers and graph neural networks)

Abstract: I'll try to motivate the relations between universal covers of graphs and graph isomorphism classification tasks implemented from graph neural networks. This is a summary of what I did during my 3 years of leave of absence due to compulsory military service in South Korea. Don't worry, everything I'll present here is already made public and not confidential, so you don't need to worry about the South Korean government officials suddenly appearing during the seminar and accusing me of misconduct!

February 28, Owen Goff

Title: The RSK Correspondence

Abstract: In this talk I will show a brilliant 1-to-1 mapping between permutations on n elements and pairs of Standard Young Tableau of size n. This bijection, known as the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth correspondence, has many beautiful properties. It also tells you the best way for people to escape a series of rooms.

March 8, Pubo Huang

Title: 2-dimensional Dynamical Billiards

Abstract: We have all played, or watched, a game of pool, and you probably noticed that when a ball hits the cushion on the table, its angle of rebound is equal to its angle of incidence.

Dynamical Billiards is an idealization and generalization of the popular game called pool (or billiards, or snooker), and it aims to understand the trajectory (as time goes to infinity) of a ball on a frictionless table that rebounds perfectly. During the talk, I will provide a lot of examples of dynamical billiards on an actual table and compare it with its mathematical counterpart. We will also see how we can relate billiards on a rectangular table to the classical example of circle rotation in dynamics.