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WEEKLY CALENDAR |
| Monday 17 |
3:10 pm, room 1404. Graph Theory and Combinatorics Seminar.
Rong Luo,
Middle Tennessee State University.
Edge coloring of simple graphs with small maximum degree.
A graph is class one if its edge chromatic number equals to
its maximum degree, otherwise it is class two. Vizing's
well-known planar graph conjecture says: a planar graph is
class one if its maximum degree is 6 or 7. The case for
This is joint work with X. Li (University of Georgia), J. Niu (West Virginia University) and X. D. Zhang (Shanghai Jiaotong University). 4:10-5 pm, room 1432. Dissertation Defense. Nick Galatos, Vanderbilt University. Varieties of residuated lattices. |
| Tuesday 18 |
2:30 pm, room 1425.Graduate students' tea.
All math personnel are invited.
3:10 pm., room SC-4309. Meeting of tenured and tenure-track math faculty. |
| Wednesday 19 |
4:10 pm, room 1426.
Approximation
Theory Seminar.
Tim Goodman.
Asymptotic Normality and Uncertainty Principles.
We show that a sequence of discrete probability
distributions is asymptotically normal, i.e., converges to the
normal distribution, provided that the sequence of polynomials with
coefficients given by the distributions has zeros in a certain region
of the complex plane. Our interest arises from the result that if the
above polynomials are symbols for refinement equations, then the
corresponding refinable functions are also asymptotically normal.
This is of importance in signal processing. We also show that the
above sequences of refinable functions have uncertainty products
that approach the minimum in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
6-7 pm, room 1206. Undergraduate Seminar in Mathematics. (With free pizza!) Chris Stephens, graduate student. To Infinity... And Beyond! (Literally!) Say you've got an infinite number of quarters in a jar - a really big jar. Then you decide to toss another quarter in the jar. How many quarters do you have now? What do you get when you add one to infinity? How about adding infinity to infinity? Can one infinity be larger than another? What does infinity mean, anyway? |
| Thursday 20 |
4:10 pm in 1431. Colloquium.
Ralph McKenzie, Vanderbilt University.
Defining and Recognizing Structure in General Algebras; Congruence
Lattices are the Key to Deep Results.
In the last three decades of the twentieth century,
universal algebra began to realize many of the lofty goals Garrett
Birkhoff had envisioned for it in 1933. Especially notable is the ability to
formulate and proof deep results about all finite and locally finite
algebraic sysems. Tame congruence theory is an analysis of the possible
ways a clone of operations on a set may be organized relative to a covering
pair of congruences that it admits. Applied to all the covering pairs
of congruences of a finite algebra a and also those of finite
algebras of functions derived from a, this theory reveals a
wealth of previously unrecognized structural features in finite
algebras, and provides natural and useful new ways of classifying them.
The task of working out the implications and extending the insights
of tame congruence theory has been the dominant theme of research
in general algebra for the past twenty years. Many of the results
discovered with its aid have since been extended by other means
to all algebraic systems (without local finiteness assumptions).
I originated this theory in 1981-84 (with the considerable help of my then graduate student David Hobby). In this talk, I will tell the story of how a long-running fascination with one little problem and several big problems, combined with stubbornness and luck, led to some big results. (Tea at 3:30 pm in room 1425.) |
| Friday 21 |