Computational Math Seminar

Our Purpose

This seminar exists to foster a strong community among the applied math (and applied math adjacent) students at UC Berkeley! We provide an opportunity to hang out with the other applied math students, exchange ideas, learn fun things, and feel connected.

As our primary goal is to create a strong community, it is extremely important that we create a welcoming environment for all. We expect all seminar attendees to show respect to people of all identities and to connect through our shared curiosity about math. If you ever feel unwelcome, please talk to a seminar organizer - we want to learn from what happened and improve.

Talks are intended to be introductory, or tutorial, or overview style, ideally such that everyone leaves knowing how a cool algorithm works, or what sort of math is used in this practical problem. See past schedules for examples topics.
Our talks are preceded by lunch, so that we have time to chat. We also schedule non-talk events, such as social events and problem-sharing sessions.

Logistics

Schedule

Date Event
09/09 Organizational and social.
09/16 Talk by Rikhav Shah: "Hermitian Diagonalization."
09/23 Talk by Jacob Elafandi: "Finite Element Analysis of Nematic Liquid Crystals."
09/30 Coding social: build a Wordle bot!
10/07 Talk by Will Cai: "Graphical Models, Belief Propagation, Multimodal Learning."
10/14 Break
10/21 Talk by Max Hirsch: "Q-tensor Inverse Problems."
10/28 Talk by Michael Kielstra: "Solving General Linear Systems with CG-like Methods."
10/30 Trivia at Triple Rock brewing (8 pm)
11/04 Break
11/11 Break (Memorial day)
11/18 Talk by Isaac: "Phase Determination in Inverse Problems."
11/25 Break (Thanksgiving)
12/02 Talk by Lewis: "Intro to Inverse Problems."
12/09 Talk by Alois: "Math of Music."

Past Semesters

Spring 2024
Date Speaker Title
01/23 Haixiang Zhang Intro to optimization
01/30 Michael Kielstra What if programming, but linear?
02/06 Break
02/13 Tom Schang Evolutionary algorithms: what, why, when, and how?
02/20 Lewis Pan Numerical methods for PDE in industry: why most things just aren't used.
02/27 Michael Mahoney Randomized linear algebra/sketching for optimization
03/05 Berk Ozturk Robust optimization
03/12 Haixiang Zhang Low-rank matrix completion
03/19 Grace Zdeblick Meshing
03/26 Spring Break
04/02 Ahmad Abassi Standing water waves
04/09 Coding/social hour
04/16 Gil Goldshlager Optimization methods and challenges in variational Monte Carlo simulations of quantum systems.
04/23 Andrew Scharf FEniCSx
Fall 2023

Missing.