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Showing posts from August, 2022

Geometric Harmony and Balance: Chopping up space with centroids.

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September 5, Olin 201, 4pm. We'll talk about the last several years of this student/faculty research project. Recently, some of this work was published in Mathematics Magazine with two student authors ( Katie Gillespie and Sophie Kotok ) and was even featured on the cover. Centroidal Voronoi tessellations (CVTs) occur in nature, for example in fish spawning, they also occur in applications from image compression to resource allocation. We'll explain what a CVT is through a series of diagrams. We'll talk about some of the questions we've answered and the many questions that remain open. The content is geometric in nature and should be accessible to anyone with mathematical curiosity.        A Voronoi tessellation (VT) starts with a collection of points in the plane and divides the plane into regions about each point so that when you are in a point's region you are closer to that point than you are to any other region's point. A CVT is a special VT in which the

Mathematical Sciences Foundry Talks

This semester, we will have a series of talks on Mondays at 4pm in Olin 201 loosely organized around the mathematical sciences. Hosted by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Whitman College, we'll provide some snacks and a speaker (or speakers) that will share some aspect of the mathematical sciences. The talks will be accessible to undergraduate STEM students. Some of the talks will be in-person by Whitman students and/or professors. Others will be remote perhaps featuring alums in industry or academics from other institutions.  This series of talks is organized by Professors Marina Ptukhina and Albert Schueller. Reach out to them if you have an idea for a talk.