[Mathreu] [Fwd: JMU SUMS Conference, Saturday 13 October]

[Kevin James]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	JMU SUMS Conference, Saturday 13 October
Date: 	Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:22:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: 	Laura Taalman <taal at math.jmu.edu>
To: 	Laura Taalman <taal at math.jmu.edu>, "Brown T. Elizabeth" 
<brownet at math.jmu.edu>



CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR UNDERGRADUATE PAPERS AND POSTERS

SUMS Conference
October 13, 2007
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia (about two hours west of D.C.)

The third annual Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics 
(SUMS) Conference at James Madison University is a one-day undergraduate 
research conference that will feature:

* undergraduate contributed talks on their mathematical research

* undergraduate and high school poster sessions on research and expository 
topics

* panel sessions on REU programs, graduate school, and industry

* an opening address by Dr. Ann Trenk, Professor of Mathematics at 
Wellesley College

* a closing address by Dr. Michael Krebs, Assistant Professor of 
Mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles

* a special AMC workshop for high school students and faculty

In 2005, SUMS hosted 233 conference participants from 27 colleges and 
universities and 6 high schools, and featured 16 student talks and 11 
student posters. In 2006, SUMS grew to an attendance of 252 people from 30 
undergraduate institutions and 5 high schools, and featured 23 student 
talks and 27 student posters.

Registration and lunch are free.  Limited travel funds are available on a 
rolling application basis.  The deadline for registration and abstract 
submission is October 1.

For more information, please do not hesitate to contact either of the SUMS 
Directors at the email addresses below.  A poster for the conference is 
attached to this email.  Abstracts for the invited addresses are listed 
below.  Visit www.math.jmu.edu/SUMS for registration and scheduling 
information.

Thank you,
Elizabeth Brown (brownet at math.jmu.edu)
Laura Taalman (taal at math.jmu.edu)
SUMS Directors


**************************
SUMS 2007 Opening Speaker:
Dr. Ann Trenk, Wellesley College

Groovy Graphs: Coloring, Scheduling and Solving Mysteries

A ``graph'' in graph theory is not a pie chart or a parabola.  It is a 
collection of vertices (dots) with edges (lines) joining some pairs of 
vertices.  We will explore graph coloring and some of its applications and 
show how graph theory can be useful in problem solving.   In one of our 
problems, six professors are suspects in a library theft.  We'll use their 
testimony together with some graph theory to identify the guilty party.

Ann Trenk is a Professor of Mathematics at Wellesley College where she has 
taught since 1992.  She has published over 20 research articles focused 
primarily on structured families of graphs and partially ordered sets. 
Her book Tolerance Graphs, coauthored with Martin Golumbic, was published 
by Cambridge University Press in 2004.  In addition to teaching at 
Wellesley College, Professor Trenk has taught high school students both as 
a full-time teacher and in summer programs, and more recently has taught 
K-12 teachers in enrichment programs. Professor Trenk was awarded the 
Wellesley College Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1995.  She 
has recently completed a term as Chair of the Mathematics Department and 
is currently serving as a member of the Executive Committee of the 
Association for Women in Mathematics and of the Editorial Board of the 
journal Involve.

**************************
SUMS 2007 Closing Speaker:
Dr. Michael Krebs, California State University, Los Angeles

Beaucoup de Sudoku

Given a Sudoku, there are some easy ways to create a new Sudoku from it - 
e.g., switch the top two rows, or rotate the grid ninety degrees.  We then 
say that the old Sudoku and the new one are ``essentially the same.'' Are 
all Sudokus essentially the same?  Working mathematicians will not be 
surprised to hear that the theory of groups is tailor-made for such a 
question.  Undergraduate math majors, however, may well find that applying 
these recently-learned methods to a familiar, concrete example brings the 
abstract theory to life.  Finding the number of essentially different 9x9 
Sudokus is probably too difficult to be an assignment in an Algebra class. 
(Jarvis and Russell have found over five billion but needed a computer for 
this computation.)  The case of 4x4 Sudokus, however, is much more 
tractable.  In this talk, we follow our paper ``Groups and mini-Sudokus,'' 
which discusses a quick and easy way to determine when two 
``mini-Sudokus'' are essentially the same.  Along the way, we make use of 
Lagrange's theorem, equivalence relations, and Burnside's Lemma, as well 
as the ubiquitous technique of finding invariants to distinguish 
equivalence classes of objects.

Mike Krebs has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, and 
is now an Assistant Professor and the Director of Developmental 
Mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles.  His research 
centers on representations of discrete groups.  While at Johns Hopkins he 
studied spaces of representations of fundamental groups of manifolds via 
algebraic geometry (in particular, the theory of Higgs bundles).  In 
recent work, he has been looking at applications of the representation 
theory of finite groups to spectral graph theory.


**************************
Funding for the JMU SUMS Conference is provided by NSF grant DMS-0536991 
through the MAA Regional Undergraduate Mathematics Conferences Program, 
www.maa.org/RUMC/.  Additional funding is also provided by James Madison 
University, including the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, 
College of Science and Mathematics, Mathematics and Statistics Club, Pi Mu 
Epsilon Club, and Research for Undergraduates Program.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Laura Taalman
James Madison University Department of Mathematics and Statistics
www.math.jmu.edu/~taal   taal at math.jmu.edu   540-568-3355
------------------------------------------------------------------





-- 
Kevin James 
Associate Professor 

O-21 Martin Hall
Department of Mathematical Sciences 
Clemson University
BOX 340975
Clemson, SC 29634-0975

phone: (864) 656-6766        
fax:   (864) 656-5230
web:   www (dot) math (dot) clemson (dot) edu/~kevja/

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