Year: 2005

  • MCS Club

    The MCS Club will be having it’s first meeting / get-together tonight at Buffalo Wild Wings in Mankato. We’ll meet at 10:00 by 3 Flags to organize rides. At the meeting we’ll discuss ideas for what we the club to do this year.

  • Zupan Wins Award for Presentation

    Gustavus math major Alex Zupan won the Council on Undergraduate Research award for the best research talk in the MAA Student Papers sessions at MathFest 2005. We have a photo of him receiving the award, complements of Paul Fishback. Zupan’s talk on Numbers and Patterns in Segments in the Hausdorff Metric Geometry was based on…

  • NCAA Scholarships

    Gustavus Adolphus College student athletes Pete Schwingler and Rachel Batalden have been selected to receive postgraduate scholarships from the National Collegiate Athletic Association; both majored in mathematics. Schwingler (tennis) and Batalden (volleyball) are among a group of student athletes that compete in a spring sport in NCAA Divisions I, II, and III to receive a…

  • The Grokster Decision: Winning a Battle to Lose a War?

    The Supreme Court’s decision in MGM v. Grokster is interesting not only in its own right, but also as an occasion to think deeply about the recording and movie industries’ strategies. Why exactly do they want to face adversaries who are ever more difficult to hold liable? There may actually be a sensible answer.

  • Applied Math Change Approved

    At the May 19th meeting of the full faculty of the college, final approval was granted for a change in the math major and minor. A new Discrete Dynamical Systems course, MCS-357, will replace MCS-353 in all roles within the major and minor. The new course will be offered in fall of even years, starting…

  • Hvidsten Receives Faculty Scholarship and Creativity Award

    At Honors Day, May 7, 2005, Professor of Mathematics Michael Hvidsten received the Faculty Scholarship and Creativity Award. Previous award winner Joyce Sutphen presented the award. What follows are the remarks she delivered on the occasion.

  • Tiger on Tiger

    As rumored, Java 1.5.0 (code named Tiger) was released as a separate download for Mac OS X 10.4 (also code named Tiger) on April 29th. So if you’re running Tiger (the OS) and are geeky enough to read this blog, you probably want the new Java. The linux labs have all been using Java 5…

  • Seminar: Modeling Human Interaction: Analyzing Recorded Meetings for Improved Speech Understanding Systems

    Rebecca Bates Tuesday, May 3, 2005 at 11:30pm in Olin 320 Speech understanding requires examination of language at many levels. Accurate speech recognition systems produce one level since these produce automatic word-level transcriptions. Computer understanding of human speech requires more than a string of words; it requires capturing the meaning of those words in all…

  • Seminar: Using Quantitative Techniques to Drive Business Results, or A Day in the Life of a Former Math Major

    Kevin Anderson Tuesday, April 26, 2005 at 3:30pm in Olin 320 Carlson Marketing Groups “Decision Sciences” division is a team of 60+ statisticians and others with quantitative backgrounds that use statistical measurement and analysis to help our clents run world-class marketing programs. In this talk I’ll describe our group, the services we provide, and the…

  • Seminar: The evolution of modeling evolution and applications to zooplankton behavior

    Urmila Malvadka Tuesday, April 19, 2005 at 3:30pm in Olin 320 Evolutionary modeling–using models to make predictions about how a species or a particular trait of a species will change in time–has evolved in the last 50 years. Classic models use a game theoretic perspective, in which species interactions are an ongoing gamebetween two types…