MathAcrossCampus Colloquium Series

The MathAcrossCampus colloquium series consists of one main talk per quarter followed by a reception, as well as a separate discussion session with each speaker. Talks are open to the public and are intended to be accessible to a wide audience.

The primary goal of this lecture series is to expose students and researchers to a wide variety of applications of mathematics to real-world problems, with a special emphasis on the growing role of discrete methods.

Talks for 2008–2009

Autumn 2008

Thursday, November 13, 2008, 3:30 – 4:30pm in Kane Hall 210, reception to follow
Joe Felsenstein (short biography), University of Washington (Genome Sciences, Biology)

Evolutionary trees, coalescents, and gene trees: can mathematicians find the woods?

Slides from presentation

Poster for Joe Felsenstein's talk: "Evolutionary trees, coalescents, and gene trees: can mathematicians find the woods?"

An evolutionary tree (a phylogeny) is a graph that shows the sequence of speciation events where one species splits into two. Two other types of tree have also become common in studies of molecular evolution. Coalescents are trees of copies of genes within a single species, and trees of gene duplication show the origin of new genes from old ones. All these trees are interrelated, and they "live" in unusual and difficult spaces. Although biologists now understand that we need mathematics and statistics to think clearly about inferring these trees, mathematics has as yet contributed few important insights about them.

Brown bag discussion session with Joe Felsenstein:
Friday, November 14, 2008, 12:30 – 1:20pm in Miller Hall 302A

Winter 2009

Thursday, January 22, 2009, 3:30 – 4:30pm in Kane Hall 220, reception to follow
Martin Grötschel (short biography), Technische Universität Berlin & ZIB (Information Technology)

Combinatorial optimization in action

Slides from presentation (.pdf) (.ppt)

Prof. Grötschel's course on combinatorial optimization at TU Berlin (Sep 21 – Oct 9, 2009)

Poster for Martin Grötschel's talk: "Combinatorial optimization in action"

Combinatorial optimization exploded on the mathematical and scientific scene in the 1950s. In this lecture I will briefly survey its development for a wide audience. Theoretical design and analysis of algorithms dominated the early development of the field, while computational progress has been particularly significant in the last twenty years. These theoretical and computational achievements, combined with successful modeling of applications, have made it possible today to solve real-world problems of breathtaking size and diversity. The majority of the lecture will report on success stories in areas such as telecommunication, transportation, traffic and logistics. These results are based on ongoing cooperation between industry, the DFG Research Center MATHEON and my research group at Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum (ZIB).

Brown bag discussion session with Martin Grötschel:
Friday, January 23, 2009, 12:30 – 2:20pm in Smith Hall 115

Spring 2009

Thursday, June 4, 2009, 3:30 – 4:30pm in Kane Hall 210, reception to follow
Andrew Gelman (short biography), Columbia University (Statistics, Political Science)

Coalitions, voting power, and political instability

We shall consider two topics involving coalitions and voting. Each topic involves open questions both in mathematics (probability theory) and in political science.

  1. Individuals in a committee or election can increase their voting power by forming coalitions. This behavior yields a prisoner's dilemma, in which a subset of voters can increase their power, while reducing average voting power for the electorate as a whole. This is an unusual form of the prisoner's dilemma in that cooperation is the selfish act that hurts the larger group. The result should be an ever-changing pattern of coalitions, thus implying a potential theoretical explanation for political instability.
  2. In an electoral system with fixed coalition structure (such as the U.S. Electoral College, the United Nations, or the European Union), people in diferent states will have different voting power. We discuss some flawed models for voting power that have been used in the past, and consider the challenges of setting up more reasonable mathematical models involving stochastic processes on trees or networks.

Here are some research articles related to Professor Gelman's talk:

Professor Gelman will also be speaking Friday, June 5, 2009, 9:45 – 11:00am in Kane Hall 225 for the Conference on Statistics and the Social Sciences at the University of Washington.

There will be no brown bag discussion with Professor Gelman.

Discussion sessions with speakers

Following each main talk and reception (either on the same day or the next) will be an open session to facilitate more informal interaction with the speaker. This session is meant to be an opportunity for students and faculty to talk to the speaker about possible research directions and open questions. The format will typically be brown bag, meaning that participants may bring their own bagged lunch to the discussion.

Selection of speakers

Invitees are high level researchers who are also renowned public speakers, selected by the MathAcrossCampus community. Ideally, one of the three annual speakers is chosen from within the Seattle community. The subject areas are kept as diverse as possible, and the main talk is intended to be accessible to a wide audience. Nominations of speakers are open to all; if you would like to nominate a speaker, send email to [enable JavaScript to view email address, or contact the organizers directly] .