Math Colloquia

“One if by Land Two if by Sea”

This line from Longfellow’s poem describes a secret signal to the patriots about approaching British troops and goes on to commemorate Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride. At the same time, the poem reveals that Revere served as a spy and that the colonists engaged in early attempts at cryptology — sending, receiving, and decoding secret messages. We will explore the role that spycraft and cryptology played in the American Revolution and in the U.S. Civil War. 

Shall we play a game? Hawks, Doves, and More

In the 1960's, ecologists began to use game theory to study evolutionary questions on topics such as animal aggression, the sex ratio, and altruism. Further study led to the creation of evolutionary game theory. In contrast to traditional game theory, evolutionary game theory seeks to describe changes in the frequency of strategies over repeated iterations of a game. Typically, the number of players in the game is fixed. In this talk, I will describe recent efforts to integrate population dynamics and evolutionary game theory models to answer questions about the evolution of animal aggression.

Part 1: Data and Donations, Joshua Hayden

A talk on using data to help project donations and find top donor prospects for the Ithaca State Theatre. How data analysis and machine learning can be put to work in the non-profit space to help communities.

Part 2: Application of Math in Real Life, Heetisha Inderjeet

As a math major, people sometimes expect that the only career goal is to teach. However, math can be a career in different ways. This project which involves working with Matthew LeRoux from the Cornell Cooperative Extension (Tompkins County) is a good example. This project consists of working with the cooperative extension partner to evaluate a meat pricing calculator and drill down on significant statistical numbers which will be able to be used for workshops and grant writing.