SCU Mathematics Colloquium Series Schedule

Fall 2002

Talks will be at 4:00pm Tuesdays in O'Connor 104. There will be refreshments before all talks in O'Connor 31 starting around 3:45pm.

• October 1 Jean-Paul Pier, Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg

  Title: The development of Harmonic Analysis during the XXth century

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• October 15 Ken Friedenbach, TDK Semiconductor Corporation

  Title: Mathematics and the Oriental Game of GO

  A brief introduction is given to the Oriental Game of GO, the rules of the game, and the apparent difficulty in developing an algorithm to solve the problem of playing good GO. While the best Chess program has defeated world class human Chess players, the best GO program is still worse than the lowest ranked club player. Different mathematical and computer engineering approaches to solving the game will be surveyed. The speaker will give an overview of his own attempts, based on graph theory and algorithms which traverse graphs.

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• October 29 John Stillwell, Monash University

  Title: Emil Post and his anticipation of Goedel and Turing

  In the mathematical logic of the 20th century, the best known names are Goedel and Turing. There are good reasons for this, nevertheless Goedel's incompleteness theorem was first discovered by Post, as was the concept of computability.

  This talk will attempt to give Post his due, and explain his approach to the incompleteness theorem, which is more instructive than Goedel's.

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• November 12 Stan Basin, Northrop Grumman Information Technology

  Title: In search of a cure for a graphical disease - the Reconstruction Problem

  Finding a proof of the Reconstruction Conjecture is probably the most famous unsolved problem in graph theory today. A brief history of the problem will be given. Several variations of the reconstruction conjecture have evolved over the past 40 years and these will be presented. The speaker thought he had a constructive proof (how naive!) only to be shot out of the saddle by one of the fast guns (a referee) hired by the Journal of Graph Theory. However, a couple of sufficient conditions for graph reconstructibility managed to fall out and survive.

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• November 19 Drazen Fabris and Sergio Zarantonello, Santa Clara University

  Title: A numerical method for vortex dynamics

  Fluid dynamics poses challenging mathematical problems where solutions are rarely found in closed form. This talk will discuss ongoing work in applying numerical methods to solving the 2-D Navier-Stokes equations in an unsteady vorticity-streamfunction formulation. This formulation involves two coupled partial differential equations, one elliptic, one convection-diffusion. Numerical procedures for solving the coupled system will be discussed. The talk will conclude with a video clip showing the results of a computer simulation of the evolution of two confined vortices. The ongoing research is directed towards understanding the merger dynamics of trailing aircraft vortices.

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• December 3 Shalini Reddy, Santa Clara University

  Title: Perfect 1-error correcting codes on iterated complete graphs

  A perfect 1-error correcting code (P1ECC) on a graph is a collection of vertices, called codevertices, such that no two codevertices are adjacent and every noncodevertex is adjacent to exactly one codevertex. The P1ECC Problem, which asks whether a given graph has a P1ECC, is NP complete for general graphs. In this talk we will discuss the P1ECC problem (and labelings) for iterated complete graphs. This talk is a report on results from a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) project at Oregon State last summer.

The list of talks from previous quarters are available via this archive link.

Last Updated: 13 October 2001
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