Spring 2018
Friday April 13, 2:30pm, DSC 254
Dr. Wendy Smith, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Enacting and supporting institutional change aimed at implementing active learning in undergraduate mathematics
Abstract: UNL has worked to reform precalculus through calculus 2 (P2C2) since 2011, and has seen significant increases in passing rates (e.g., College Algebra rose to and has been sustained at 80% after a historical passing rate of around 60%). The department undertook reforms holistically and systematically, in collaboration with a national network of faculty all working to change the culture around P2C2 courses. Dr. Smith will share what UNL has done, what the impact of the changes have been, the current work, and next steps.
Biography: Dr. Wendy Smith is the Associate Director of UNL's Center for Science, Mathematics and Computer Education. As a former middle level mathematics teacher and current mathematics education researcher, Dr. Smith's research has focused on studying change at the individual (attitudes, beliefs and knowledge), group (impact of professional development on teachers and their students), and institution levels (education policy and institutional change).
Fall 2016
Friday September 2nd, 3pm, DSC 116
Bryan Johnson, Oracle Data Cloud
Scalable Machine Learning on Big Data Graphs (Cool Math Talk)
A graph structure can be a great way to store and represent highly connected data. When this data is "big data", special tools are needed for access and analysis. In this talk we will give an overview of some popular distributed data processing tools like Apache Hive and Spark, which can be used to analyze graphs with hundreds of billions of edges. Several algorithms for graphical data structures will be discussed. We will outline the workflow for a production-ready machine learning model on a graph and discuss common issues that arise when working with big data.
Tuesday January 26th, 4:45pm, Thompson Alumni Center
Mathematical Connections in STEM: An Activity Approach
Dr. Neal Grandgenett & Dr. Elliot Ostler
UNO College of Education
Abstract:
Mathematics is often the conceptual foundation or “pedagogical glue” that holds interdisciplinary STEM environments together so that students can learn foundational concepts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Mathematics also helps to illustrate and to empower students in such environments, as they undertake real life problem solving, engineering design, or scientific inquiry. This Math Teaching Circle will explore more than 30 different “STEM Bin” activities, as well as other hands-on strategies for enhanced STEM learning within a mathematics education context. Teaching circle participants will explore various hands-on activities in small groups and receive a series of handouts that help them to modify or to duplicate the activities for their own classrooms.
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Wednesday March 7th, 2:30pm, DSC 254
Theatre Geek turned Math Nerd: My Mathematical Journey in 3 Acts (Cool Math Talk)
Katie Wanek,
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Abstract:
Katie Wanek hasn’t always been a fan of math. In middle school, she hated it and cried over her math homework for hours each night. She left high school with plans to become a drama teacher, but on the advice of a former high school teacher, she enrolled in Calculus I her freshman year of college. The rest they say is history. In this Cool Math Talk, Katie will discuss how she went from being a theatre geek to the math nerd she is now and the lessons she learned along the way.
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Friday September 16th, 3pm, DSC 116
Matt Culek, Chief Operating Officer of Citadel Execution Services at Citadel Securities
Life in High Frequency Trading and a Mathematically Oriented Business Career
Abstract: Come learn how mathematics, a core quantitative ability and rigorous problem solving, are extremely useful in the world of business. Hear the story of someone who did not have enough passion for pure mathematics to pursue a career in research or academia, but was able to build on its core skills to eventually run the largest client-facing high frequency trading business in the US. This path included everything from modeling correlation risk while trading mortgage-backed securities in the heat of the financial crisis to identifying and simulating implicit financial risks while advising senior management of the largest financial services firms in the world. See how math has contributed to this path, plays a key role in the highly systematic and automated world of high frequency trading, and ask any questions you have about non-traditional career paths for a math major.
Biography: Matt Culek graduated from UNO in 2002 with degrees in Mathematics and Physics. He subsequently began (and quickly decided not to complete) a PhD in number theory at the University of Texas, worked as a pension actuary, earned his MBA from the Booth School of Business at University of Chicago, was a trader at Lehman Brothers through the bankruptcy in 2008, and was an Associate Principal in strategy consulting at McKinsey & Co in New York. He is currently the Chief Operating Officer of Citadel Execution Services at Citadel Securities. Citadel Execution Services is the largest equities market maker in the US and receives 36% of all orders from retail investors every day. Matt currently is living and working in Chicago, IL with his wife and two young children.
Tuesday September 27th, 3pm, DSC 164
Dylan King, UNO Math Student
An Undergraduate Research Experience in Mathematics at MSU (Cool Math Talk)
Dylan King is a student in his fourth year at UNO. Though starting out in civil engineering, he switched to mathematics and secondary education, and is set to graduate in 2018. Dylan is currently a TA for calculus classes and the Vice President for the Math Club. In this math talk Dylan will discuss his experience with his REU this past summer.
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Thursday October 13th, 11am, DSC 298
Dr. Frank Hsu, Fordham University
Ranking and Scoring: Analyzing Big Data and Building Cognitive Systems
Abstract: Ranking and Scoring are often used in scientific discovery, technology innovation, and data analytics (in the STEMS domain). In this talk, we will: (1) introduce the notion of multiple scoring systems (MSS), (2) explore when and how to best combine those MSS', and (3) extend those insights to build cognitive systems which are resilient, effective and useful in the Big Data environment. One of the key issues we will address is the contrast between the two forms of similarity measurement: cognitive diversity (as an information diversity measurement) in Informatics and correlation (or rank correlation) (as a data correlation measurement) in Statistics. We will also cover a variety of Big Data domain applications including virtual screening, target tracking, joint decision making for prediction, corporate revenue forecasting, and figure skating judgments.
Biography: Frank Hsu is the Clavius Professor of Science, a Professor of Computer and Information Science, former chair of the Department, and former Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham University in New York City. Dr. Hsu’s research and education interests include combinatorics and graph theory, network interconnection and communication , macro-informatics, data and information fusion, and big data analytics. Hsu is currently on editorial board of: Journal of Interconnection Networks, Journal of Advanced Mathematics and Applications, Brian Informatics, Health Information Science Book Series and IEEE Trans. on Reliability. Hsu received a Master degree from the University of Texas at El Paso and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. He was chair of the Section of Computer and Information Science at the New York Academy of Sciences and is chair of the New York Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
Spring 2016
Tuesday January 26th, 3pm, DSC 254
Hot Chocolate and Hangman
UNO Math Club
Abstract:
Welcome Back! Please come join the math club to kick off the new year! Come enjoy some hot cocoa and some games of math hangman while we talk about future math club events
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Tuesday January 26th, 4:45pm, Thompson Alumni Center
Dr. Neal Grandgenett & Dr. Elliot Ostler, UNO College of Education
Mathematical Connections in STEM: An Activity Approach
Mathematics is often the conceptual foundation or “pedagogical glue” that holds interdisciplinary STEM environments together so that students can learn foundational concepts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Mathematics also helps to illustrate and to empower students in such environments, as they undertake real life problem solving, engineering design, or scientific inquiry. This Math Teaching Circle will explore more than 30 different “STEM Bin” activities, as well as other hands-on strategies for enhanced STEM learning within a mathematics education context. Teaching circle participants will explore various hands-on activities in small groups and receive a series of handouts that help them to modify or to duplicate the activities for their own classrooms.
Flyer
Wednesday March 7th, 2:30pm, DSC 254
Katie Wanek,, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Theatre Geek turned Math Nerd: My Mathematical Journey in 3 Acts (Cool Math Talk)
Katie Wanek hasn’t always been a fan of math. In middle school, she hated it and cried over her math homework for hours each night. She left high school with plans to become a drama teacher, but on the advice of a former high school teacher, she enrolled in Calculus I her freshman year of college. The rest they say is history. In this Cool Math Talk, Katie will discuss how she went from being a theatre geek to the math nerd she is now and the lessons she learned along the way.
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Tuesday April 26th, 2:30pm, DSC 256
Dr. Erin Carmody,, Visiting Assistant Professor, Nebraska Wesleyan University
Independence and Infinity (Cool Math Talk)
Abstract: Let us discover how the formalization of the concept of infinity led to an investigation of the foundations of mathematics. We shall learn how to count to infinity and beyond, and ask ourselves one of the most mysterious questions in mathematics: how big are the real numbers? Just as the parallel postulate is an independent axiom in geometry, we will see that there are many independent axioms involving infinity.
Biography: Dr. Carmody is from Omaha, Nebraska. In 2004 she graduated with a BS from UNO with a major in mathematics (and a concentration in art). After that, she earned an MA in mathematics at the University of Kansas. She then taught at KU for one year. Following that, she moved to NYC to be a PhD student at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Last April, she defended her thesis "Force to Change Large Cardinal Strength." Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln.
Fall 2015
Friday October 9th, 2:30pm, DSC 254
Andrew Gacek, UNO Class of 2004
Careers in Mathematics & Computer Science
As a UNO undergraduate majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science, Andrew Gacek was involved in undergraduate research and competed in the Putnam Mathematical Competition where, as a junior in December 2003, he scored 60 points, placing in the top 2% of the over 3,000 students from across the US and Canada who participated that year.
After he graduated in 2004, Andrew completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2009 at the University of Minnesota and then spent a year as a post-doc at INRIA Saclay in France. He is now a Senior Industrial Logician at Rockwell Collins, applying his mathematical background to the verification of safety critical systems.
Come hear what life, work and yes!! mathematics look like in an industrial research group.
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Monday October 12th, 2:30pm, DSC 254
Dr. Lynda Wiest, Professor of Mathematics Education and Equality Education, University of Nevada at Reno
Gender Issues in Mathematics Education (Cool Math Talk)
In this session, Dr. Wiest will share issues regarding females in mathematics education and solution strategies for supporting and encouraging girls in mathematics. A handout will be provided.
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Friday November 6th, 2:30pm, DSC 254
Dr. Kevin Keating, Professor of Mathematics, University of Florida
Galois Modules and Ramification Theory
Let K be a local field and let L/K be a finite totally ramified Galois extension. The ramification breaks of G = Gal(L/K) measure how close certain elements of G are to the identity. In certain ”degener-ate” cases the number of ramification breaks is less than one would expect based on the order of G. I will consider the problem of finding replacements for the missing ramification breaks in terms of distances between elements of various group rings of G. This is joint work with Griff Elder, and builds on the work of Byott-Elder.
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