Spring 2003 Schedule

• To Infinity... And Beyond! (Literally!) (March 19th)
  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? Join math graduate student Chris Stephens at this week's Undergraduate Seminar in Mathematics and learn everything you've always wanted to know about infinity, but were afraid to ask!

• Do You Know Your Roots? (March 26th)
  Irrational, imaginary, complex... These words usually represent ideas that are hard (if not impossible) to wrap your mind around. In this week's talk, David Petersen will help us take a look at some of the ways we can understand these "impossible" ideas applied to numbers.

• The Incredible Shrinking Data (April 2nd)
  In Clarksburg, West Virginia, the FBI maintains a database of 81 million sets of fingerprints. That's about 13,500 hard drives full of information! How does the FBI store all this data? They shrink it, of course, just as you might do to a song when you store it on your computer as an MP3. Join mathematics graduate student Derek Bruff at this week's Undergraduate Seminar in Mathematics and learn about the mathematics behind the data compression used by MP3's, digital photos, and the FBI!

• What Drives the World (April 9th)
  Did you ever wonder what makes a wave keep going after you throw a pebble into a pond? Or how heat is conducted in a metal? Or how plants and snowflakes grow? Join mathematics graduate student Peter Hinow at this week's Undergraduate Seminar in Mathematics and discover the mathematics of time.

• The Simpsons Rule: A Math Lesson from Springfield (April 16th)
  At fourteen seasons, The Simpsons is tied with Ozzie and Harriet as the longest running sitcom of all time. You know it's a funny show, but did you know that the head writer has a degree in mathematics from Harvard? In this week's talk, mathematics graduate student Casey Leonetti will take us on a tour of the third and fourth dimensions with a little help from Homer and Bart.