Spring 2008 GSS Schedule

Date Speaker Topic Abstract
January 21 MLK Holiday    
January 28 Lori Layne Mathematical Applications in Bioinformatics  
February 4 Ricky Farr Instability of Taylor Series Approximations to a Heat Conduction Problem  
February 11 Woody Something About a Stochastic Storage Model for Snowfall  
February 18 Janine Janoski Matrices with Row and Column Sum 2 Let M(n, s) be the number of nxn matrices with binary entries, row and column sum s, and whose rows are in lexicographical order, and let S(n) be the number of nxn matrices with entries from {0, 1, 2}, symmetric, with trace 0, and row sum 2. (The sequence S(n) appears as A002137 in N.J.A. Sloane's Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.) We will show M(n, 2) = S(n).
February 25 Bonnie McAdoo Tomography, Scrabble, and Germany  
March 3 Brian Dandurand Parallel Programming with Condor Condor is a management tool for allocating and managing batches of computation jobs over a pool of computers. At Clemson, we have our own Condor pool which is available for use to faculty and students.
Condor is typically used when one wants to submit several (e.g. thousands) of computation jobs to be assigned a computer in the pool and return results on completion. These jobs typically require no communication with one another, and their case differentiation can be indexed in some way by natural numbers 0, 1, 2, .... In this way, one can save a tremendous amount of time in gathering the needed data for research.
Common usage of Condor include Monte Carlo simulation runs, genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, database searches, sampling function evaluations and more. In this talk, I will introduce the audience to Condor, go through its basic mechanisms, demonstrate an example submission, and talk a little about my own work and the Condor experiments that it involves.
The talk will conclude with a brief discussion on issues dealing with pseudorandom number generation, essential knowledge for any Condor experiment that involves (pseudo)randomness.
March 10 Jeremy Lyle Independent sets in Graphs I will talk about some ways to find large independent sets in graphs, particularly classes of graphs defined by forbidden subgraphs.
March 17 Spring Break    
March 24 Mingfu Zhu Proving the 100 Swiss Francs conjecture Algebraic statistics is an emerging field, where algebraic method found its application in statistical models. The central idea underlying algebraic statistics is that the parameter spaces of many statistical models are (semi-)algebraic sets. Lots of interesting open problems arise in this field. In today's talk I want to present some of our recent work for a specific open problem, named 100 Swiss Francs Conjecture, where 100 Swiss francs will be offered by Bernd Sturmfels as a prize for a rigorous proof.
March 31 Brad Paynter An Optimization Approach to Wheel Lug Hole Templates  
April 7 Sarah Edwards Sudoku, Graph Coloring, and Grobner Bases  
April 14 Jang-Woo Park    
April 21 Dr. Taylor Getting an Academic Job