Upcoming talks
All meetings will take place on the second Friday of the month at 2:00PM, EST, unless otherwise noted below.
Join in via Zoom at this link: https://msu.zoom.us/j/94740679958 (Passcode: Cardano)
Meeting details will be posted here as they become available.
November 13, 2026: Dana Mackenzie (Mathematician and Science Writer)
- Title: How to Solve a 2000-Year-Old Math Problem
- Abstract: In the fourth century BCE, a famous Chinese military strategist named Sun Bin came up with a fiendish way to cheat in team competitions that consist of individual matches. In a competition of three horses against three horses, he said, you should sacrifice one race by running your slowest horse against the opponent’s fastest. In the other two, you race your fastest against the opponent’s second fastest, and your second-fastest against the opponent’s third fastest. I call this “Master Sun’s strategy.” For mathematicians, this poses all sorts of intriguing questions. Does Master Sun’s strategy actually improve your odds of winning the match? Does it increase the expected margin of victory? How big an advantage do you gain? Is it the best possible strategy? Finally (a question that Master Sun apparently didn’t ask), how do the answers change (if at alll) for a match of N horses versus N horses? I will talk about the history of the problem and the fascinating life of Sun Bin. I will also talk about the unusual way I found out about this problem and (completely to my surprise) solved it for N horses under certain simplifying assumptions.
December 11, 2026: Terika Harris (Teachers College, Columbia University)
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February 12, 2027: Ryan Thomas (Charleston Southern University)
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March 12, 2027: TBD — This may move to March 19 to avoid spring break
April 9, 2026: David Murphy (Hillsdale College)
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Past talks
October 9, 2026: Ramiro Carrillo Catalán (National Pedagodical University, Oaxaca, Mexico) (Time change: This talk begins at 3:30PM, EST)
- Title: An algebraic structure and a geometric representation for the Tonalpohualli, the Central Mexican ritual calendar
- Abstract: To keep track of time, Mesoamerican peoples used two calendar systems: the 260-day ritual calendar and the 365-day solar calendar. There is evidence that the use of these calendar systems was widespread in Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. The mathematical structure of the Mesoamerican calendar system has intrigued and drawn academic interest from the colonial period to the present day. In this talk, we will discuss a description of an algebraic structure that models the 260-day ritual calendar system. Through this structure, it is possible to determine the relationship between the day number and the corresponding day name using certain group actions. Likewise, the twenty trecenas and the thirteen veintenas of the ritual calendar are described algebraically as orbits of two group transformations. In addition, due to the continuous, uninterrupted nature of this way of recording time, we propose a geometric representation that allows us to visualize the sophisticated mathematical design and structural harmony underlying ancient Central Mexican temporal systems. These descriptions can be useful not only for interpreting codices, but also for challenging and reconsidering our contemporary notion of time. How does the inherent mathematics of these systems change our perception of time?
April 10, 2026: Colette Chilton-Carr (Florida Atlantic University)
- Title:
- An Overview of the Usage of Ancient and Contemporary Vigesimal Numeral Systems
- Abstract:
- The modern base-10 decimal system originated during the 1st to 4th century A.D. and remains in place for most cultures. From the 3rd century B.C.E through the 17th Century A.D., the Maya had multiple ways of representing their numerals, one of which is the vigesimal system. In the mid 1990s, the vigesimal system was revamped by a contemporary group of marginalized mathematicians, and is still in use and being researched by universities to this day, but not without facing backlash. This presentation will include the historical context of the vigesimal numeral system within the Pre-Classic, Classic, and Post-Classic Maya periods, the contemporary vigesimal numeral system, and examples of how to perform arithmetic through both of these methods.
March 13, 2026: Dwight Anderson Williams II, (Morgan State University)
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- Navigating mathematical and political structures: A perspective on the works of Black researchers in theoretical mathematics
February 13, 2026: Eugene (Bud) Boman (Penn State, Harrisburg) and Robert Rogers (SUNY Fredonia)
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- From Problems to People: History-Driven Storytelling in Mathematics Teaching
- Abstract:
For the first several millennia of human existence a large component of any education consisted of stories told and heard around a campfire. As a result storytelling as a pedagogical tool is deeply embedded in the human psyche. But it is difficult to convey mathematics via stories so we — or at least our textbooks — have for the most part simply dispensed with this essential pedagogical tool, opting instead for the highly efficient seeming theorem/proof/example approach. Most teachers recognize, at least intuitively, the poverty of this. But how does one embed a given topic, say calculus, into a story while simultaneously maintaining focus on the mathematics to be learned?
It sounds impossible, but it is not.
There are a multitude of interesting and beguiling stories in mathematics. Taken together they make up what Ivor Grattan-Guiness has called our mathematical heritage. They explain why modern mathematics has taken its current form, conceptually, notationally, and culturally and they provide context for the subtle and often non-intuitive ideas and methods our students must master. We have written two textbooks (and we’re working on a third) where we have explicitly used our mathematical heritage as a frame for the topics being taught. In the course of writing these books we found that we could also present the progression of mathematical ideas itself as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. We will discuss our efforts to use story-telling techniques as an effective teaching mode in our textbooks and classrooms without sacrificing the mathematics.
October 3, 2025, Saša Popović (Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade)
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- Still the antique prejudice against infinitely small quantities remains
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February 7, 2025,
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December 6, 2024
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November 1, 2024
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