STUDENT SEMINAR

SPRING 2010

Thursday Jan. 21 12:30--13:30 Room E519	Marcus du Sautoy Mathematics professor, Oxford University (UK), He is well-known for its extensive work in popularizing mathematics.	The Story of Maths - Part 1/4 - The Language of the Universe BBC Documentary (Marcus du Sautoy will not be present) In this opening programme Marcus du Sautoy looks at how fundamental mathematics is to our lives before exploring the mathematics of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece.
Thursday Jan. 28 12:15--13:30 Room C674	Marcus du Sautoy Mathematics professor, Oxford University (UK).	The Story of Maths - Part 2/4 - The Genius of the East During Europe's Middle Ages, mathematics flourished primarily on other shores. The second part of the Story of Math program follows Professor Marcus du Sautoy as he discusses mathematical achievements of Asia, the Islamic world, and early-Renaissance Europe.
Monday Feb. 01 12:30--13:30 Room W565	Ben Burnett BS in computer Science University of Lethbridge Staff for the CONDOR project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison	Condor and High Throughput Computing (HTC) Condor is a specialized workload management system for compute-intensive jobs. Like other full-featured batch systems, Condor provides a job queueing mechanism, scheduling policy, priority scheme, resource monitoring, and resource management. While providing functionality similar to that of a more traditional batch queueing system, Condor's novel architecture allows it to succeed in areas where traditional scheduling systems fail. Condor can be used to manage a cluster of dedicated compute nodes. In addition, unique mechanisms enable Condor to effectively harness wasted CPU power from otherwise idle desktop workstations. In this talk we will provide and introductory look at the Condor software bundle, discuss some of its features and applications as well as providing a brief tutorial on its use.
Tuesday Feb. 09 12:30--13:30 Room B756	Marc Moreau Student - 3rd Year B.Sc Computer Science University of Lethbridge	Image Set Compression Many applications involve the storage of a large number of similar images. For example, a medical database may contain a large number of X-ray images of the same body part; a database of satellite images may possess "similar" characteristics; a database of facial images contain many similar images. Compared to "traditional" image compression, the compression of a collection of similar images has received relatively little attention from researchers. Recent work on compression schemes for these images have been proposed based on graph theory, minimum spanning trees (MSTs) and clustering. In this talk I will explore different methods of computing distance measures, including my recent research, with Dr. Howard Cheng, on distance measures using wavelet transforms and jpeg2000 compression. This talk will be accessible to all who are interested. No prior knowledge of image compression or graph theory are necessary.
Thursday Feb. 25 12:15--13:30 Room C674	Marcus du Sautoy Mathematics professor, Oxford University (UK).	The Story of Maths - Part 3/4 - The Frontiers of Space In this third episode of ``The Story of Maths'', Marcus du Sautoy presents how by the 17th century, Europe had taken over from the Middle East as the world's powerhouse of mathematical ideas. Great strides had been made in understanding the geometry of objects fixed in time and space. The race was now on to discover the mathematics to describe objects in motion. In this programme, Marcus du Sautoy explores the work of René Descartes and Pierre Fermat, whose famous Last Theorem would puzzle mathematicians for more than 350 years. He also examines Isaac Newton's development of the calculus, and goes in search of Leonard Euler, the father of topology or 'bendy geometry' and Carl Friedrich Gauss, who, at the age of 24, was responsible for inventing a new way of handling equations: modular arithmetic.
Thursday March 11 12:30--13:30 Room C674	Darcy Best Student - 3rd Year B.Sc Math University of Lethbridge	Unbiased complex Hadamard matrices A complex Hadamard matrix is a very simple matrix of order n whose entries are all in {-1,1,i,-i} and its rows are pairwise orthogonal. Two complex Hadamard matrices H and K of order n are called unbiased if HK=L, where K denotes the conjugate transpose of the matrix K, and L is a matrix whose entries have the same absolute values. Pairs of unbiased complex Hadamard matrices exist only in orders which are the sum of two squares. For example, there are none of order 6, as 6 is not a sum of two squares, but there are many pairs of unbiased complex Hadamard matrices of orders 10 and 18. There is no theoretical method known yet to show the existence of (or lack of) these matrices. Unbiased complex Hadamard matrices have applications in quantum information theory including quantum coding and quantum cryptography. The talk is a mixture of theory and computer programming and will be easy to follow.
Thursday March 25 12:15--13:30 Room C674	Marcus du Sautoy Mathematics professor, Oxford University (UK).	The Story of Maths - Part 4/4 - To Infinity and Beyond Marcus du Sautoy concludes his investigation into the history of mathematics with a look at some of the great unsolved problems that confronted mathematicians in the 20th century. After exploring Georg Cantor's work on infinity and Henri Poincare's work on chaos theory, he looks at how mathematics was itself thrown into chaos by the discoveries of Kurt Godel, who showed that the unknowable is an integral part of maths, and Paul Cohen, who established that there were several different sorts of mathematics in which conflicting answers to the same question were possible. He concludes his journey by considering the great unsolved problems of mathematics today, including the Riemann Hypothesis, a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers. A million dollar prize and a place in the history books await anyone who can prove Riemann's theorem.
Tuesday April 13 12:15--13:30 Room C610	Mark Thom BsC Student, Major in Math Supervisor: Nathan Ng.	Divisor Functions \\and the Riemann Zeta Function This talk will serve as a modest introduction to the theory of multiplicative functions and their role in classical and contemporary problems in analytic number theory. We will discuss landmark ideas and historical sources of motivation in a broad and intuitive fashion, without much appeal to mathematical rigour. Particular attention will be paid to sums of the kth divisor function, which counts the number of ways a positive integer n may be written as a product of k factors, with regard to order. We will also discuss a method for relating the estimation of sums of multiplicative functions to the analysis of the Riemann zeta function, illustrated with simple examples.

About the documentary The Story of Maths (BBC Documentary in 4 independent parts)
Du Sautoy documents the development of mathematics covering subjects such as the invention of zero and the unproven Riemann hypothesis. He escorts viewers through the subject's history and geography. He examines the development of key mathematical ideas and shows how mathematical ideas underpin the science, technology, and culture that shape our world.
He starts his journey in ancient Egypt and finishes it by looking at current mathematics. But in between he travels through Babylon, Greece, India, China, and the medieval Middle East. He also looks at mathematics in Europe and then in America and takes the viewers inside the lives of many of the greatest mathematicians.

FALL 2009
Mondays, 12:00-12:50, room W565

Monday Nov.09

Paul Zhu

Master's student
(Dr. Jackie Rice)
Sun Campus Ambassador

Research interests: Computer Science

A Lightweight Architecture for Secure Two-Party Mobile Payment Transaction

The evolution of wireless networks and mobile devices has resulted in increased concerns about performance and security of mobile payment systems. In our research we propose SA2pMP, a lightweight secured architecture for two party mobile payments. The simulation and comparison proves that SA2pMP is a lightweight secured mechanism that is practicable for two-party mobile payment transactions, e.g. mobile banking, over Java ME enabled, resource-limited mobile devices.