Monday, 23 November 2009
Mathematics Education Graduate Student Brown Bag
Heather Cavell, Kathleen Ross, College of Education, The University of Arizona, will speak at 12:00 PM in Gould-Simpson 849.
Building Student Capacity for Mathematical Thinking and Reasoning: An Analysis of Mathematical Tasks Used in Reform Classrooms Author(s): Mary Kay Stein, Barbara W. Grover, Marjorie Henningsen Source: American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 455-488. Link to full text: http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/stable/pdfplus/1163292.pdf
Special Analysis and Its Applications Seminar
Anna Ghazaryan, Department of Mathematics, The University of Kansas, will speak on “Nonlinear convective instability of fronts in reaction-diffusion systems” at 4:00 PM in Math 402. (Refreshments will be served at 3:30 p.m. in the Commons Room.)
Fronts are traveling waves in spatially extended systems that connect two diļ¬erent spatially homogeneous rest states. If the rest state behind the front becomes unstable, then the front will also destabilize. On the linear level there exists an exponentially weighted norm that stabilizes the front, in other words, the instability of the front in the co-moving frame is convective since perturbations are pushed away from the interface of the front. At the same time, for most of the nonlinearities, introducing a weight complicates the nonlinear analysis: the nonlinear stability cannot be simply inferred from the linear stability. I will demonstrate how the interplay of norms with and without weight can be used to prove the convective character of the instability on the nonlinear level.
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
Algebra and Number Theory Seminar
Matthew Papanikolas (Texsas A&M), Department of Mathematics, Texas A&M University, will speak on “Values of Goss L-functions at positive integers and log-algebraicity I” at 2:00 PM in Math 402.
We will consider special values of Goss L-functions for Dirichlet characters at positive integers, which take values in the completion of the rational function field in one variable over a finite field. Building on work of Anderson for the case of L(1,chi), we will deduce various power series identities on tensor powers of the Carlitz module that are "log-algebraic" and in turn use these formulas to determine exact values of L(n,chi) for arbitrary n > 0. Moreover, we will relate these L-series values to powers of the Carlitz period and values of Carlitz polylogarithms at algebraic points.
Mathematics Instruction Colloquium
Jing Long Hoelscher, Department of Mathematics, The University of Arizona, will speak on “Using Group-Projects in Calculus” at 4:15 PM in Gould Simpson 849. (Refreshments will be served.)
Group-Projects are a great way to get interactions among students and it facilitates team work. I will share my group-project experience in my calculus class. In addition, I will also talk about other techniques like fun facts and math games that can be used in a calculus class. Those ideas are originally from the Project NExT Workshop I participated in.