Marketing and Communications
2007 Kieval Lecture Series Talks
05/01/2007
(Ashland, Ore.) – Jon McCammond, professor of mathematics at Santa Barbara, CA., will present the 2007 Kieval Lecture Series Talks at Southern Oregon University. This lecture is divided up into three different time slots and can be seen at the following times:
ü Thursday, May 3, 2007 Sigma Xi Invited Lecture, 8:00 p.m.
in the Stevenson Union Rogue River Room. This talk will focus on a connected set of surprises that arise through simple iteration: punching the [cos] button repeatedly on a calculator, continued fractions -- along with their connections to the golden ratio and the Fibonacci numbers, and continued square roots, with some mentions of Ramanujan, Chebyshev polynomials, and the Mandelbrot set thrown in along the way.
ü Friday, May 4, 2007, 10:00 a.m. in Central 105. The talk will consist of a gentle introduction to the lattice itself and three of its many guises: as a way to count the parking functions defined by combinatorialists, as a key part of the foundations of non-commutative probability, and as a building block for a contractible space acted on by the braid groups. Finally, as the talk is aimed primarily at undergraduate majors and minors, all of the areas listed above will be introduced as they arise.
ü Friday, May 4, 2007, 3:00 p.m. in Science 118. There are many contexts in which a tree diagram is the best way to summarize a set of data. The main resonable way to average trees arises from the surprising fact that "the space of all trees is non-positively curved." By the end of the talk this assertion should make sense and the corresponding averaging procedure should be clear.
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