Mathematical Sciences Foundry

Monday February 27 at 4pm in Olin 201. Dr. Rick Archibald will discuss pathways to careers in applied mathematics at the Department of Energy (DOE). This talk is part of the Computational Research Leadership Council (CRLC) Seminar Series 2022-2023. This presentation will highlight different applied mathematical research that is supported at the laboratory complex at the Department of Energy (DOE). It will focus on data analytics and provide information on various programs designed to foster engagement with the DOE.  BIO: Dr. Archibald received his Ph.D. in Mathematics, from Arizona State University in 2002. He works in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory .  Dr. Archibald 's research interests lie in data reconstruction and analysis, high-order edge detection, large scale optimization, time integration, and uncertainty quantification.  

Monday February 13 at 4pm in Olin 201. Whitney Griggs, a Caltech MD-PhD candidate and Josephine de Karman Fellow, will discuss ways to apply the mathematical sciences in biomedical career paths, with a focus on computational and translational neuroscience. Using interactive case studies, he will discuss his own journey from learning mathematical reasoning at Whitman to applying these mathematical skills to the design of ultrasonic brain-computer interfaces. Whitney will highlight several key aspects of this project, including converting radiofrequency data into ultrasound images, implementing real-time neural decoders, and using Euclidean transformations to stabilize the neural decoder across multiple months.   BIO:   Whitney is currently a 6th year MD-PhD candidate in the UCLA-Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program. Since 2001, he has been interested in brain-computer interfaces, and, after 22 years of fortuitous events, he is now pursuing a PhD where he investigates ways to impr

  Monday February 6 at 4pm in Olin 201. Our own Andy Fry will talk about tropical mathematics. Tropical mathematics replaces addition ( a+b ) with taking the minimum (min{ a,b }) and multiplication ( ab ) with addition ( a+b ). When we do this, lines and curves transform ( tropicalize ) into piecewise-linear objects. A strength of tropical geometry is that it allows us to look at a "linear" skeleton of a potentially complicated geometric object, reducing algebro-geometric questions to those of combinatorics. A strong trend in modern algebraic geometry is the study of  moduli (parameter) spaces . Broadly, a moduli space parameterizes geometric objects, and we can define algebraic moduli spaces and tropical moduli spaces independently. My research investigates tropicalization questions involving moduli spaces of curves, that is, which algebraic moduli spaces "tropicalize" to their tropical counterparts. In this talk, I will introduce tropical mathemati