Fall 2024:

September 13, 2024

2:10 pm

Dr. Hortensia Soto (Professor of Mathematics and President of the Mathematical Association of America):  Talk is "Creating Metaphors for Linear Algebra Concepts: Developing Cognitive, Behavioral, and Affective Domains"

Spring 2024:

April 12, 2024

2:10 pm

Dr. Edgar Fuller (Florida International University):  Talk is "Fixed and Mixed-effects Models of Student Learning Measure Dependence on Instructional Practices in Calculus"

 

Spring 2023:

April 27, 2023

3:10 pm

Dr. Quiang Du (Materials Science and Engineering, Columbia University):  Talk is "Nonlocal Modeling, Analysis and Computation:  Some Recent Development"

 

Fall 2022:

October 17, 2022

4:10 pm

Dr. Edray Goins, Professor of Mathematics, Pomona College. Addressing Anti-Black Racism in Our Departments.

Abstract:

In April 2021, the PBS Newshour ran a story with the headline "Even as colleges pledge to improve, share of engineering graduates who are Black declines." Indeed, there is a dearth of Black students in our mathematics classrooms. A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that Black students earned just 7 percent of STEM bachelor's degrees. Unfortunately, this is an issue for our faculty as well. A 2017 report in Inside Higher Ed states that there has been an increase over time in the diversity of senior and junior faculty members in the STEM fields -- except Black faculty. A New York Times article, titled "For a Black Mathematician, What It’s Like to Be the 'Only One,'" quoted that there are just a dozen black mathematicians among nearly 2,000 tenured faculty members in the nation’s top 50 math departments.

What can we as faculty members do to make our mathematics departments more welcoming and diverse for Black students and faculty alike? These are daunting problems, and many with an interest in presenting solutions do not even have tenure! In this interactive presentation, we present some practices that even tenure-track faculty can engage in to showcase how #BlackLivesMatter -- from increasing the number of pathways for majors, to building community by conducting research with students, and having hard conversations within hiring committees.

Fall 2019:

November 4

Dr. Kate Stange (Dept. of Mathematics, Univ of Colorado at Boulder):  Title of Talk is "Illustrating the arithmetic of imaginary quadratic fields"

September 3

Dr. Karen Uhlenbeck (Distinguished Visiting Professor School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study): Title of Talk is "Glimpses into the Calculus of Variations" (this talk was not recorded when Dr. Uhlenbeck spoke at MSU, however it is the same talk that she gave when receiving the Abel prize, which is what is linked here).

Spring 2019:

January 10

Dr. Nathan Geer (Dept of Mathematics and Statistics, Utah State University): Title of Talk is "Re-normalized Link Invariants"

March 14

Dr. Kate Petersen (Dept of Mathematics, Florida State University): Title of Talk is "Character Varieties and Symmetries of 3-Manifolds" 

March 28

Dr. Marcin Bownik (Department of Mathematics, University of Oregon):  Title of Talk is "Exponential frames and syndetic Riesz sequences"

April 25

Dr. Alex Zupan (Department of Mathematics, University of Nebraska):  Title of Talk is "A special case of the Smooth 4-dimensional Poincaré Conjecture"