The Null Set: News and Events

"Unofficial" Undergraduate Tea and Cookies occurs every Friday at 3:30 PM in the Fine Hall common room (3rd floor). Tea and Cookies is a social tradition of the Princeton math department. It provides an informal social setting to encourage communication between math aficionados. Although tea is open to everybody, it has been dominated by graduate students and professors in the past. We hope to change this habit by encouraging all Math Club members to attend on Fridays. Try to come early or on time because the cookies seem to disappear quickly!

Upcoming Events and Recent News
(Only the past five events are being displayed, click here to view all events)

Date

Event

Wednesday
5/4/05

Special Guest Speaker: MAY 4th, 3:00pm, Location TBA.
"The idea of a moduli space" I'll try to get this idea across starting completely from scratch; the talk will be suitable for non-math majors but will (I
hope) contain some material of interest to the majors (in particular, I will try to say the word "functor" by the end.)

Abstract:

The study of moduli spaces is a staple of contemporary number theory and algebraic geometry. The precise definition is quite hard to state if you're not familiar with the language of category theory; however, the idea behind the definition is quite simple, and is in some sense a very natural generalization of the main idea of Cartesian geometry; that there's a one-to-one correspondence between pairs of real numbers and points on a plane.

Saturday
11/13/04

Undergraduate Math Talk: 3:30pm in room 314, Fine Hall.
Prof. Jordan Ellenberg, "THE MATHEMATICS OF SET, or EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT COMBINATORIAL GEOMETRY I LEARNED PLAYING CARDS"

Abstract:

The game of Set is a simple but addictive card game played with a special 81-card deck. A standard "folklore question" among players of this game is: what is the largest number of cards that can be on the table which do not allow a legal play? I'll explain how this question, which seems to be about cards, is actually about geometry over a finite field, and I'll talk about what's known about this problem and related ones. If there's time, I'll try to convince you that this problem might have something to do with _algebraic geometry_, and if there's even more time, I'll try to convince you that, no, in fact, it really has to do with Fourier analysis.

Sunday
10/3/04

Undergraduate Math Talk: 3:30 in room FINE314.
Nate Kaplan, "How I spent my Summer Vacation (Aside from Getting Arrested): Factorization Lengths in Numerical Monoids"

Saturday
9/18/04

Undergraduate Math Talk: 3:30 in room 314, Fine Hall.
Matt Satriano '05, "Every positive integer is the sum of four squares." Followed by lots of Chinese food.

Abstract:

In 1772, Lagrange proved that every positive integer can be expressed as a sum of four integral squares. This theorem is proved in MAT 331 using Complex Analysis, but here we will see a much more elementary proof. The key ingredient will be Minkowski's generalization of the following intuitively obvious fact: if R is a region with finite area that is convex, symmetric with respect to the origin, and has area greater than 4, then R must contain some integral point other than the origin.

Sunday
5/9/04

Undergraduate Math Talk: 5pm in room 314, fine hall.
Darsh Ranjan "lights out!"

Abstract:

on an original theory he has developed by studying the game "Lights out!". This will also take place in Fine 314. Food will follow the talk.

Also on Sunday after Darsh's talk, we will be discussing the future of the Math Club... so if you're interested in seeing the math club operate next year, you should come by.