Interesting talks at the CUMC 2011

In June, Université Laval held the CUMC 2011. The CUMC is one of North America’s largest undergraduate conferences. Undergraduate students across Canada come to exchange on mathematics and to learn on different interesting fields. There is usually 8 Keynote Speekers and a lot of different talks given by the students. This year, I have learned on subjects that I had no idea of their existence. I also learned on different activities and student organizations that exist in Canada.

Here are the talks that I really enjoyed for different reasons.

Before I begin, I just want to write about Bruno Joyal’s talk: Universality across mathematics. I did not see his talk, but he put a paper of his talk on his blog that I found interesting.

First, let’s begin with the Keynote speakers.

• I really enjoyed Pamela Gorkin‘s talk: Not an ellipse? Not my problem. She talked about “Blaschke Products and several seemingly unrelated results in which ellipses make an unexpected appearance.” The talk was really clear and surprising!
• Frederick Rickey was also a great speaker. His talk, The fundamental Theorem of Calculus: History, Intuition, Pedagogy, Proof, was dynamic. I really enjoyed to hear him talking about how it was to teach in a military school.

Second, here are my favorite student talks.

• Ana Iorgulescu : Why Mathematicians Will Never be Out of a Job: Gödel’s First Incompletness Theorem. The talk was about a simplified proof of the FIrst Incompleteness Theorem, which was given by George Boolos. I did not know about this simplified proof and found the concepts involved interesting. It is based on the paradox that the least integer not nameable in fewer than 19 syllables is in fact nameable in 18 syllables.
• John Yang : A Painless Introduction to Complex Dynamics. This talk was about Complex Dynamics. John Yang made an introduction to Julia Sets, Normal families, invariance lemma and iteration lemma. These concepts really kept my attention and I will certainly read on this in the future.
• Jean- Sébastien Turcotte : Une généralisation de l’intégrale de Riemann. This talk was about the Henstock-Kurzweil integral. This is a really nice concept, which is more general then the Riemann and the Lebesgue’s integral. For instance, the set of Henstock-Kurzweil integral functions contain the set of Riemann integral functions and Lebesgue integral functions.
• Eric Naslund : Pretentious Number Theory. This talk was about a new branch of analytic number theory. It tries to give elementary proofs to important theorems of analytic number theory, that is, without using the Riemann Zeta function and its zeros. This theory has been mainly developed by Granville and Soundararajan.

So these are topics that I found interesting and I will certainly read on these new concepts. Maybe some of you will also want to know what are these subjects.

About these ads