Madison Math Circle Abstracts 2019-2020

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Meetings for Fall 2019

Talks start at 6pm in room 3255 of Helen C. White Library, unless otherwise noted.

Fall 2019
Date Speaker Topic
September 23, 2019 Soumya Sankar Why don't map makers like high heels?
September 30, 2019 Erika Pirnes Why do ice hockey players fall in love with mathematicians?
October 7, 2019 Uri Andrews Self-reference, proofs, and computer programming
October 14, 2019 James Hanson When is a puzzle impossible?
October 21, 2019 Owen Goff Symbolic Logic and How It's Really Just Arithmetic
October 28, 2019 Ian Seong Counting, but Not Like Kindergarteners
November 4, 2019 Omer Mermelstein Ciphers: To Gibberish and Back Again
November 11, 2019 Colin Crowley Many Pennies
November 18, 2019 Daniel Corey The Königsberg Bridge Problem


Meetings for Spring 2020

Talks start at 6pm in room 3255 of Helen C. White Library, unless otherwise noted.

Spring 2020
Date Speaker Topic
January 27, 2020 Caitlyn Booms Magic or Math?
February 3, 2020 Erika Pirnes Finding Your Roots
February 10, 2020 Xiao Shen Constructing the 17-gon
February 17, 2020 Ben Bruce 1+1=2 and Other Integer Partitions
February 24, 2020 Brandon Boggess Pi-ck Up Sticks
March 2, 2020 Solly Parenti Lazy Math
March 9, 2020 Connor Simpson Counting Ways to Color Graphs
March 23, 2020 Tejasi Bhatnagar Canceled
March 30, 2020 Yunxuan Li Canceled
April 6, 2020 at 4pm Daniel Erman Virtual: Josephus Problem and Intro to Research Mathematics
April 13, 2020 at 4pm Caitlyn Booms Virtual: To Infinity and Beyond
April 20, 2020 at 4pm Juliette Bruce Virtual: Finding the Fastest Slide


Off-Site Meetings

We will hold some Math Circle meetings at local high schools on early release days. If you are interesting in having us come to your high school, please contact us!

Fall 2019
Date Location Speaker Title Abstract
October 7, 2019 2:45pm East High Solly Parenti Tangled Up in Two Every tangled cord you have ever encountered is secretly a number. Once you learn how to count these cords, cleaning your room will be as easy as 1-2-3.
November 4, 2019 2:45pm James Madison Memorial Caitlyn Booms Sneaky Segments We call a line segment drawn between two lattice points in the coordinate plane sneaky if it does not pass through any other lattice points. During this presentation, we will try to understand exactly when this happens, and we'll discuss how to calculate the probability that two randomly chosen lattice points are connected by a sneaky segment.
November 11, 2019 2:45pm East High Maya Banks Tic-Tac-Topology Tic-Tac-Toe is a game usually played on a flat piece of paper. In this standard setting, there is winning strategy--that is, if the player who goes first chooses their moves correctly, they will never lose. But we can also play Tic-Tac-Toe on a surface that isn't lying flat in a plane! In this talk, we will explore the game of Tic-Tac-Toe on cylinders, donuts, and even some wilder surfaces. We'll look for optimal strategies, and learn some topology in the process.
December 16, 2019 2:45pm James Madison Memorial Daniel Erman Really Big Numbers We will discuss the role that really really, really big numbers play in modern mathematics and in science. This will be a discussion of estimation and an introduction to some of the ways that mathematicians express unfathomably big numbers.


Spring 2020
Date Location Speaker Title Abstract
February 17, 2020 2:45pm James Madison Memorial Maya Banks Tic-Tac-Topology Tic-Tac-Toe is a game usually played on a flat piece of paper. In this standard setting, there is winning strategy--that is, if the player who goes first chooses their moves correctly, they will never lose. But we can also play Tic-Tac-Toe on a surface that isn't lying flat in a plane! In this talk, we will explore the game of Tic-Tac-Toe on cylinders, donuts, and even some wilder surfaces. We'll look for optimal strategies, and learn some topology in the process.
March 9, 2020 2:45pm East High Michel Alexis Kakeya Needle Sets Take a 1-inch needle. A shape in the plane (i.e. a shape you can draw on a piece of paper) is called Kakeya if we can place the needle within the shape, and by only rotating and shifting the needle within the shape (no lifting!) we can get the needle to point in all directions. We will think about what sort of shapes are and aren't Kakeya, how this affects their geometry, and how small these shapes can be.
April 13, 2020 2:45pm James Madison Memorial Juliette Bruce Canceled TBD
April 20, 2020 2:45pm East High Omer Mermelstein Canceled TBD