I have been spending my sabbatical this year at MSRI and the University of California, Berkeley. I cannot complain about the great interaction with faculty from all over the world, and the wonderful “sunny and 65” days in the Bay area. So why did I spend… Continue reading »
Transferrific Day was January 22, 2010 for the Williams Math/Stat department. For a number of years we have taken a day (or an afternoon) in January to learn together some area of math. This year we used as a springboard David Ruelle’s Dynamical Zeta Functions and Transfer Operators (… Continue reading »
Williams is in the process of evaluating the current residential system and trying to come up with new models for housing. Currently, the College uses the neighborhood system, wherein the College is divided into four neighborhoods. Upon finishing the first year, students enter a given neighborhood and remain… Continue reading »
Williams College has this wonderful tradition called Winter Study. Williams students are overloaded with courses, sports, extra-curricular commitments, and who knows what else during the fall and spring semesters. During January, for 3 1/2 weeks, they get to relax – just a little. There are academic courses offered… Continue reading »
At the December 2009 joint meeting of the American and Korean Mathematical Societies, it was inspiring to hear at the panel of presidents and throughout the meeting of the great potential, though up against scarce resources. Korea will support 1000 mathematians from developing countries at its 2014… Continue reading »
Since soap bubbles minimizing surface area or energy provide the typical model for my research in the calculus of variations, I receive lots of related and unrelated reports from friends. My former student Kevin Hahm ’07 sent me a link to an amazing video of water droplets… Continue reading »
Write-up of a departmental faculty seminar, October 2, 2009 Solutions to problems in geometry and physics and even in the social sciences tend to be symmetric. As prime example, the solution to the isoperimetric problem, which seeks the least-perimeter way to enclose given volume in R3, is a sphere, the most symmetric of all shapes. One way to prove this is to show that anything else improves as you make it more symmetric. For thousands of years, mathematicians have been looking for good ways to make shapes more symmetric and to prove that as they get more symmetric they “get better,” for example, enclose the same volume with less perimeter. My favorite references are Burago and Zalgaller [BZ, §9.2] and Ros [R1, §3.2]. This talk is based on [MHH]. Gromov [G, §9.4] provides some sweeping remarks and generalizations, including most of our results. 1. Steiner symmetrization [St, 1838] replaces every vertical slice of a region in R3 with a centered interval of the same length, as in Figure 1. By calculus, the volume does not change, but one can show that the perimeter decreases (or remains the same). Figure 1. Steiner symmetrization replaces every vertical slice with a centered interval of the same length. www.math.utah.edu/~treiberg/Lect.html Continue reading »
Adam F. Falk, Hopkins physicist and dean, named 17th President of Williams Falk won honorable mention on the 1985 Putnam Exam, the same year Martin Hildebrand ’86 scored in the (unranked) top five. (See Amer. Math. Monthly 93 (1986), 620-626.) He taught Alex Diesl SMALL ’99 physics for… Continue reading »
Do you like risk? Or, more precisely, do you like to assess and quantify risk and put a price on it (the premium that insurance collects)? If yes, consider becoming an actuary. This profession almost always makes the top 10 in the various best jobs lists (like this… Continue reading »
Two weeks ago, the first UnKnot Conference was held in Granville, Ohio at Denison University. And no, UnKnot does not stand for a conference devoted to the properties of the trivial knot, which would be short conference indeed, but rather for the Undergraduate Knot Theory Conference. Organized by… Continue reading »