We were fortunate to have several colloquium talks within our department for faculty and students this year.
On September 9, Dr. Gregory Budzban, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, gave a presentation titled “Markov Chains, Network Synchronization, and Random Walks on Matrices: A Unified Perspective.” Beginning with hands-on examples of colored directed graphs, Dean Budzban guided the audience through an easily understood introduction to the Road-Coloring Problem. Over the course of an hour, Dean Budzban touched on key concepts from graph theory, linear algebra, and probability, while pointing out their significance for applications in network synchronization.
On March 29, Dr. Andy Neath gave a presentation titled “Statistical Modeling for Replication Studies.” His talk provided examples of some interesting aspects of statistical problems in analyzing replication studies, and some thoughts on how the information from a single study fits together with what we learn from replication attempts.
On April 21, Dr. Jim Parish gave a presentation titled "Simple Closed Geodesics on Rectangular Prisms." In his talk, he described some of the ideas and techniques used in the study of geodesics (locally shortest paths) on polyhedra, and then showed how those ideas apply to rectangular prisms - i.e., boxes of specified length, width, and height. He concluded by outlining the complete classification of simple closed geodesics - that is, geodesics which form a complete, non-self-intersecting loop - on these prisms.