MCS

Category: department news

  • MCS Seminar and Math Grad School Presentation on Monday 10/28

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    mklynn

    On Monday, 10/28, Professor Richard McGehee from the University of Minnesota will be giving a seminar talk entitled “Earth’s Heat Imbalance,” on math modeling for climate change. An abstract for the talk can be found at the end of this post. The talk will start at 3:30 pm in Olin 321 with refreshments beginning at…

  • October Problems of the Month

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    jsiehler

    Congratulations to September’s supremely successful solvers: Filip Belik, Luke Haddorff, Tom LoFaro, James Wittrig, and Katherine Williams. October’s Problem #1 is just a game of Xs and Os: Imagine that the following list of three 7-letter words is made from tiles with X on one side, and O on the other side:   OOOXXXX XXOXOOX…

  • Pizza and Problem Solving Returns!

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    anienow2

    Pizza and Problem Solving will resume on Friday September 27. Come and help solve interesting, challenging, and just plain fun math problems and puzzles. Sometimes we even play games with some math content. You don’t need to have any particular background in math to join, i.e. you do not need to be a math major. We have many problems/puzzles…

  • MCS Seminar on Monday 9/30 at 3:30 pm

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    jdowney

    Dr. Adam Loy from Carleton College will be giving a seminar talk entitled, “Can’t a computer do that? Exploring automatic evaluation of statistical graphics.”  The talk will start at 3:30 pm in Olin 321 with refreshments beginning at 3:15 pm. The department looks forward to seeing you there!

  • MCS Summer Research: Offensive Performance in Baseball

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    anienow2

    Offensive performance in baseball depends on a number of correlated factors: the pitches the batter faces, the batter’s choice to swing, and the batter’s hitting ability. The choices of whether or not to swing, which can be  describe as plate discipline, has traditionally been summarized as the proportion of pitches inside and outside of the…

  • September Problems of the Month

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    jsiehler

    Congratulations to last year’s top solvers: Filip Belik and James Wittrig! Once again, we’ll be hosting “Problems of the Month” throughout the fall semester, and we invite everyone throughout the college to take part! Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome to submit solutions, and there are prizes for the top student solvers during the…

  • MCS Summer Research: Altruistic Suicide in E. Coli Bacteria

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    anienow2

    Over the summer Dr. Jeff Ford and Sanjeeda Shutrishna are working on a project to study the evolution of altruistic suicide in E. coli bacteria. The bacteria employ a strategy where, when the colony encounters a pathogen, some bacteria will self-destruct before the pathogen can spread.  Dr. Ford and Shutrishna are attempting to use network…

  • MCS Summer Research: Social Media and Exercise

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    anienow2

    This summer Filip Belik  and Dr. Louis Yu have been investigating the relationship between social media and exercise.  The content of the summer work can be separated into two distinct tasks. They are first utilizing the text classification capabilities of several machine learning algorithms to find the most effective way of classifying social media posts from Twitter…

  • Congratulations to Dr. Louis Yu!!!

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    anienow2

    Mathematics Computer Science and Statistics department member Dr. Louis You was one of  six Gustavus faculty members that received tenure today. Congratulations Louis!  You earned it.    

  • December Problems of the Month

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    jsiehler

    Congratulations to November’s successful solvers: Filip Belik, Sam Thompson, and James Wittrig. December’s Problem #1 is a slippery, sliding rearrangement problem: Each move in the game below consists of sliding two checkers from adjacent boxes to two open positions, keeping them adjacent and in their original order as they move. In three moves, the pattern…