Mathematical Sciences Foundry

Monday, November 4 at 4pm in Olin 201. Ximena Catepillán, PhD, professor emerita of Millersville University will talk about computations among Maya calendars. Mesoamerican calendars were many and complex. A good number of studies have been done to decipher them. By the arrival of Hernan Cortes in 1519 in what current day Mexico is, there were 21 calendars in use while 4 of them were extinct. Using astronomical observations, the Maya developed an elaborate system of calendars, among them the Tzolkin Calendar, the Haab Calendar, the Round Calendar, and the Long Count. Which operations did the Maya use to perform their calendrical computations? While they used a vigesimal system to write the numbers, this system was never used in connection with days. No inscriptions use vigesimal numbers but rather quasi-vigesimal numbers. In spoken numbers, a mix of decimal and vigesimal notation appears.  They also needed to divide to do some of the calendar conversions. Ximena will illustrate cale...

Monday October 21 at 4pm in Olin 201. Emilie Purvine, of the Pacific Northwest National Lab will talk about how mathematical structures and concepts can be great models of real-world data. For example, differential equations have a long history of success in applied mathematics to model dynamics found in rivers and oceans, the atmosphere, and molecular systems (just to name a few!). Network science is an area of applied math that uses graph structures to model relational systems like social, collaboration, and transportation networks. Graphs, however, are limited to modeling pairwise relationships among entities. Hypergraphs and topological spaces provide alternate models of relational systems that allow for arbitrary sized and structured relationships. In this talk, Dr. Purvine will introduce the mathematical concepts of graphs, hypergraphs, and topology and show how they are used to model real-world data from a variety of applications including biological systems, chemi...