Math Club Colloquium

This seminar covers topics suitable for undergraduate students. Seminars are held during common hour on Tuesdays from 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm.

Spring 2014

Speaker: Kishore Marathe (Brooklyn College)
Date: Tuesday Feb 18, 2014
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: 1127N

Title: Moonshine at 30 - Part I
Abstract: In my previous Math Club talks (Monster exists, 2012), I discussed the existence of the Monster, the largest sporadic group and the related Moonshine conjectures. In these talks I will discuss the tremendous developments that have taken place in the 30 years since then. They have led to even more surprising results extending to other groups and relating the corresponding Moonshine to conformal field theory and string theory in physics and Ramanujan's mock theta functions and closely related mock modular and Jacobi forms.
Announcement

Speaker: Kishore Marathe (Brooklyn College)
Date: Tuesday Feb 25, 2014
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: 1127N

Title: Moonshine at 30 - Part II

Speaker: Diogo Pinheiro (Brooklyn College)
Date: Tuesday March 18, 2014
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: 1127N

Title: Optimal Life Insurance, Consumption and Investment Decisions

Abstract: We will discuss an extension to Merton's famous continuous-time model of optimal consumption and investment, under which a wage earner with a random lifetime allocates some portion of her income to consumption and life insurance purchase, while investing her savings in a financial market. The wage earner's problem is to find the optimal consumption, investment, and insurance purchase decisions in order to maximize the expected utility of her family consumption, of the size of her estate in the event of premature death, and of her total wealth at the time of retirement, provided she lives that long. We will see how to use optimal control techniques to obtain explicit solutions for such problem in the case of discounted constant relative risk aversion utility functions, providing also some economic interpretation. We will conclude with a discussion of possible extensions.
Announcement

Event: Math Clinic: The Math Club's tutoring event for lower division math courses
Date: Tuesday April 8, 2014
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: 1127N
Announcement

Speaker: Christian Benes (Brooklyn College)
Date: Tuesday April 29, 2014
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: 1127N

Title: Random Fractals

Abstract: One of the "hottest" topics of research in probability of the past few decades is a random fractal called the Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE). In the last 8 years, two mathematicians were awarded Fields Medals for showing that SLE is related to well-known random processes such as loop-erased random walk and percolation. In this talk, I'll explain what fractals are and how random fractals appear naturally in a number of physical phenomena.
Announcement

Event: 2014 - 2015 Elections for Math Club Officers (Brooklyn College)
Date: Tuesday May 13, 2014
Time: 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Location: 1127N
Announcement



Previous Semesters

Fall 2013
Spring 2013
Fall 2012
Spring 2012
2010 - 2011