Math Across The Cannon – Monday, April 21st and Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025
Guest Speaker: Jordan Ellenberg, Professor of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin; Author of Shape and How Not To Be Wrong
About the speaker: Jordan Ellenberg is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the NYT best selling author of How Not To Be Wrong (2014) and Shape (2021) and has been writing about mathematics for popular audiences for over fifteen years. His award winning work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wired, The Believer, the Boston Globe, and Slate.
A renowned scholar in the fields of number theory, algebraic geometry, and algebraic topology; he holds/has held an NSF-CAREER grant, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Simons Fellowship, and was selected as an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Public Lecture: St. Olaf College, Monday, April 21, 2025, 7:00 pm, Tomson Hall 280, Reception to follow
From Mosquitoes to ChatGPT — the Birth and Strange Life of the Random Walk
Abstract: Between 1905 and 1910 the idea of the random walk, now a major topic in applied math, was invented simultaneously and independently by multiple people in multiple countries for completely different purposes. From mosquito control to physics to finance to winning a theological argument (really!), I’ll tell some part of this story and also gesture at ways that random walks (or Markov processes, named after the theological arguer) underlie current approaches to artificial intelligence. I’ll explain what this tells us about the capabilities of those systems now and in the future, using some examples from my own research in applications of AI to problems in pure mathematics.
Colloquium: Carleton College, Tuesday, April 22, 2025, Olin 149, Reception at 3:30pm, Lecture at 4:00pm
Smyth’s Conjecture and a Non-Deterministic Hasse Principle
Abstract: The matrix
3 -3 4 -4 5 -5 0 0
4 -4 -3 3 0 0 5 -5
-5 5 0 0 -3 3 -4 4
has an interesting property. Can you see what it is?
In case this puzzle is not enough information about the talk: I will explain how to prove a conjecture of Smyth from 1986 about linear relations between Galois conjugates, and explain what this has to do with linear combinations of permutation matrices, Brianchon’s theorem on ellipses inscribed in hexagons, weightings on the edges of directed hypergraphs, and the study of Diophantine equations where the equation is to be solved with probability distributions instead of with numbers. This is joint work with Will Hardt.
Everyone Welcome!
Sponsored by:
St. Olaf College Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science, and Computer Science, Carleton College Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the TLC Colloquium Series Fund, and the Michael Morill Fund
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