Many Cheerful Facts 2008


Many Cheerful Facts meets on Tuesdays from 2:10–3:00pm in 1015 Evans Hall. The talks are given by graduate students and are aimed at a general mathematics audience.

If you are interested in giving a talk or baking some cookies or another delicious treat, please contact Morgan Brown, Brad Froehle, or Ivan Ventura.

Previously on Many Cheerful Facts: 2007, 2006 (fall, spring), 2005, 2001–2004.


Schedule of talks — Fall 2008

For Fall 2008, Many Cheerful Facts met on Tuesdays from 2:10–3:00pm in 1015 Evans Hall.

Date Speaker Title
September 9 Brad Froehle You sure? Yeah, I'm Totally Positive
September 16 Chul-hee Lee From Triangles to Automorphic Functions
September 23 Daniel Sparks Hilbert's Irreducibility Theorem
September 30 Alex Fink Hex and the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem
October 7 Daniel Pomerleano The Mahler Conjecture and Gauss Linking Integrals
October 14 Michael Pejic The Perilous Perturbatory Perihelion Precession Problem
October 21 Theo Johnson-Freyd Feynman Diagrams and a Categorical Approach to Calculus
October 28 Adam Boocher Blowing Things Up: A Maverick Approach to Resolving Singularities
November 4 Election Day; No talk.
November 11 Veteran's Day; No talk.
November 18 Shenghao Sun Analytic Continuation and Functional Equation for the Riemann Zeta Function
November 25 Thanksgiving Break; No talk.
December 2 Aaron Kleinman TBA
December 9 Damien Mondragon Differential Galois Theory

Schedule of talks — Spring 2008

For Spring 2008, Many Cheerful Facts met on Wednesdays from 12:10–1:00pm in 1015 Evans Hall.

Date Speaker Title
January 30 Justin Blanchard A Total Order on Chaos
February 6 Morgan Brown A Short Introduction to Topolocial Persistence
February 13 Cynthia Vinzant Pattern Avoidance in Permutations
February 20 Andre Kornell New Deductive Procedures (Exceptional Time: 1:10-2pm!)
February 27 Brendon Rhoades (U of Minnesota/MSRI)
Morgan Brown
Kazhdan-Lusztig Theory and You
How to Find a Spouse
March 5 Steven Sam Representability by Sums of Squares
March 12 Ivan Matic Mathematical Games
March 19 Dave Penneys What Everyone Should Know About Inner Products
March 26 Spring Break; No Talk
April 2 Daniel Cristofaro-Gardiner Lattices and Sphere Packings
April 9 Jose Alameida How To Get A Handle On Unbounded Operators (Exceptional Time: 2:10-3pm!)
April 16 Vinicius Ramos Tropical Curves and Bézout's Theorem
April 23 Mike Hartglass Tiling Rectangles and Tori
April 30 Brendon Rhoades (U of Minnesota/MSRI) Kazhdan-Lusztig Theory and You
May 7 George Schaeffer Algebra or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Non-Unique Factorization (Exceptional Time: 1:10-2pm!)