53rd EIU Math. Ed. Conference set April 5th, 2010

Using Billiards in the classroom?

Using the equinox to find latitudes?

Social Justice and Dark Matter: What do they have in commmon?

Just how big is a trillion?

Interested? Attend the EIU Mathematics Education Conference and find out more

see

http://www.eiu.edu/~adulted/10MathConf.pdf

for more details.

Department to Host Geometry/Topology Day March 27:

The Eastern Illinois University Department of Mathematics and Computer Science will host a day of hour long talks in geometry and toplopogy on Saturday March 27th. The schedule follows:

9 am coffee

9:30 am Bruce Kitchens - IUPUI

The Dynamics of the Nash Map for 2 by 2 Games

11 am Kamlesh Parwani, EIU

Quasi-isometric foliations for partially hyperbolic diffeomorphisms

12 pm Lunch

2 pm Hong Kun Zhang U-Mass-Amherst

Spectral gap for the Markov operator of certain random billiards


3:30 pm Serge Tabachnikov, Penn St. U.

Pentagrama Myrificum, Old wine into new wineskins

Peter Andrews to Give March 26th Colloquium:

Peter Andrews will speak today on 'Well Behaved Matrices and Knotty Diagrams'. In particular, he will discuss how to compute the Khovanov invariant for various knots or not.

More Nerd Graffiti

Svetlana Butler to Give March 12th Colloquium

Abstract:

We would like to analyze what can be said about the large deviation behavior of martingales,approximate identities, and related operators. Given some sequence m_n of positive integers, and some sequence w_n of positive real numbers, and let the linear operators

T_n : L1(R) \to L1(R)

be either the dyadic Lebesgue derivatives or the dyadic martingale. We will prove positive and negative results concerning certain convergences related to these sequences and operators

Rick Anderson to Give March 5th Talk: Abstract follows

Mathematics educators have an ongoing concern with students' achievement and participation in mathematics courses. It is recognized that all groups of students do not have comparable access to mathematical opportunities or success in mathematics courses. Students in rural areas and small towns approximately one-fifth of US school-aged children are one such group whose mathematics achievement and participation have been tracked in recent decades. In this talk I will summarize the mathematics achievement of rural high school students in the US as it compares to students in non-rural areas. Then I will present results of rural high school students' mathematics course-taking drawn from data collected for the 2005 NAEP High School Transcript Study. I will conclude with a discussion of the implications of the results for mathematics teachers in rural areas.