EPaDel Spring 2023 Section Meeting

Our Spring 2023 meeting was held April 15, 2023 at Penn State Brandywine.

Schedule

View this meeting's schedule

Invited Speakers

Image of Speaker Doug Ensley (Shippensburg University)
Finding Your Mathematical Identity

I will present some results (from the final undergraduate research project I supervised before retiring from teaching in 2022) on generalizations of typical Pascal Triangle identities, including a cute relationship that allows you to create your own identities within customized triangular arrays of numbers. Within this context I will share some thoughts on the value of understanding interconnections between the mathematical topics we study at the undergraduate level and how my own identity as a mathematician has formed over 40 years.

View bio

Image of Speaker Talea Mayo (Emory University)
Mathematics applied: the use of computational models to understand climate change impacts to storm surge risk

It is widely accepted that climate change will cause global mean sea level rise, increasing coastal flood risk in many places. However, climate change also has significant implications for tropical cyclone climatology. Specifically, hurricane intensity, size, and translation speed are all expected to intensify in the future, and each of these influences storm surge generation and propagation. In this talk, I will discuss probabilistic and deterministic numerical modeling approaches we have taken to understanding what this means for coastal flooding from storm surges.

View bio

Image of Speaker Edray Goins (Pomona College, Chair of MAA Congress)
Clocks, Parking Garages, and the Solvability of the Quintic: A Friendly Introduction to Monodromy

Imagine the hands on a clock. For every complete the minute hand makes, the seconds hand makes 60, while the hour hand only goes one twelfth of the way. We may think of the hour hand as generating a group such that when we "move" twelve times then we get back to where we started. This is the elementary concept of a monodromy group. In this talk, we give a gentle introduction to a historical mathematical concept which relates calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and group theory into one neat theory called "monodromy". We explore lots of real world applications, including why it's so easy to get lost in parking garages, and present some open problems in the field. We end the talk with a discussion of how this is all related to solving polynomial equations, such as Abel's famous theorem on the insolubility of the quintic by radicals.

View bio

Student Activity

Local Organizers

The local organizer for this meeting is Samantha Pezzimenti of PSU Brandywine. Please contact a local organizer with site-specific questions, or contact an Executive Committee member with more general questions.