Suhrit Dey to Give Friday November 13th Colloquium

Professor emeritus Surhit Dey will talk at 4 pm. Friday November 13th about stiff systems. The talk will attempt to explain certain natural phenomena of perception.

There Once was a Fellow Named Gauss

There once was a fellow named Gauss
whose scholarly peers could not grouse
of his genius elan
on which he had drawn
for his manifold curvature blouse

Scott Tichenor of the University of Illinois to Give November 6th Colloquium

Scott will give a short introduction concerning curves of constant width and provide examples. He will also show how to construct these curves.

Gregory Galperin Discusses Rational Dissection of Polygons

Professor Galperin discussed the problem of dissecting a pentagon using the diagonals as shown.


The first question is whether the areas a1,a2,...,a10 taking rational values implies that the area a11 is a rational number. The answer is that it does. But more surprisingly, we need only a1,a2,...,a9 to take rational values in order to imply that the areas a10 and a11 take rational values.

Professor Galperin was able to show that it is only necessary that 5 consecutive triangles have rational areas in order to show that all of the dissected areas are rational for the pentagon. In addition, he indicated how the result generalizes.