Author: clee7

  • Dan O’Keefe wins the third annual Gustavus StarCraft 2 Tournament

    The tournament winners receive the certificates and prizes. (Left-to-right: Prof. Choong-Soo Lee, David Buckley (’13), Joshua Wolanyk (’15), Dan O’Keefe (’15) Derek Evenson (’13)) This past J-Term the StarCraft Club hosted the third StarCraft II tournament. Unlike the first two tournaments, this year’s tournament took place in two phases: the group stage and elimination bracket.…

  • Mathematical Representations of Ciliate Genome Decryption

    When: Thursday, February 28 @ 11:30am Where: Olin Hall Room 320 Presenter: Helen Wauck, Junior Mathematics & Computer Science Major Ciliates are unique unicellular organisms that each contain a scrambled version of their own DNA which must be unscrambled for proper gene expression. Ciliates have developed three DNA operations for this purpose: reversals, block interchanges, and…

  • Characteristics of Chinese Online Social Networks

    When: Monday, February 18, 2013 @ 1:30PM Where: Olin Hall Room 320 Presenter: Dr. Louis Yu, Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Pomona College In recent years, social media services and its subscribers have multiplied at a phenomenal rate. This immense growth has been witnessed globally with millions of users creating and sharing content on…

  • Calculated Clustering–An Application to Childhood Growth Trajectories

    When: Thursday, November 29, 2012 @ 3:30PM Where: Olin Hall Room 321 Presenter: Brianna Heggeseth, University of California, Berkeley Through the integration of technology into practically every aspect of our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly possible to collect massive amounts of data on individuals over time. My work revolves around finding meaning and structure in…

  • Sequential Designs for Non-Stationary Problems

    When: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 @ 3:30PM Where: Olin Hall Room 321 Presenter: Marian Frazier, The Ohio State University NASA is designing a new reusable rocket booster and wants to understand how flight characteristics like lift, drag, and pitch will change as a function of speed and angle of attack. Ossur wants to build a stronger…

  • MCS Club T-shirt for Sale

    It’s been years since the MCS Club has been represented in shirt form on the Gustavus campus. This year’s officers of the laid-back, fun-loving and often nerdy club thought this was unacceptable and started a design contest to choose the new club t-shirt. Many entertaining entries later, the students of the department voted on a…

  • MCS Students Attend ACM Programming Contest

    Six MCS students went to Macalester College today to participate in the annual ACM Programming Contest. The contest originally started at Texas A & M in 1970. It spread through North America and has branches and chapters throughout the world. “The contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability…

  • An Introduction to Surface Tension (Or Why Raindrops are Spherical)

    When: Thursday, October 11, 2012 @ 3:30pm Where: Olin Hall 320 Presenter: Andrew Bernoff, Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College A common misconception is that raindrops take the form of teardrops. In fact, they tend to be nearly spherical due to surface tension forces. This is an example of how at small scales the tendency of molecules…

  • On the Virtues of Monte Carlo Simulation – even for mathematicians (and actuaries)

    When: Wednesday, September 19, 2012, 11:30am-12:20pm Where: Olin Hall 318 Presenter: Gary A Hatfield, PhD FSA CFA CERA MAAA Investment Actuary, Corporate Actuarial, Securian Financial Group Over my years as an actuary, I have developed a deep appreciate of the power and value that Monte Carlo simulation brings as tool for gaining insight to various…

  • Edge Subgroups of the Reals

    When: Wednesday, September 12, 2012, 12:30pm-1:20pm Where: Olin Hall 320 Presenter: Ron Rietz, Professor of Mathematics, Gustavus Adolphus College Let R be the group of real numbers under addition. A subgroup H of R is an edge subgroup in case there is a number x in R such that x is not an element of…