Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Talks for the week October 13-17, 2008 (previous week)
Student Research Seminar: "A brief introduction to mathematics''  Click to add this event to your calendar
Date Monday, October 13, 2008
Time 10:00 am  - 10:50 am CDT
Where Room G-4 Rolla Building
Event Type Lectures & Seminars
Presenter Gordon Stangler, undergraduate mathematics student
Sponsored by Mathematics and Statistics Department
Contact Dr. Matt Insall
Description Mathematics is a broad vigorous field with a large amount of ongoing research in numerous subfields and thousands of papers being published yearly. This talk will focus on some of the most famous solved, unsolved and unsolvable equations to dot the mathematical landscape over the past five millennium.
Graduate Student Seminar  Click to add this event to your calendar
Date Monday, October 13, 2008
Time 4:00 pm  - 5:00 pm CDT
Where Room G-5 Rolla Building
Event Type Lectures & Seminars
Student Research Seminar: "Primes and their role in encryption''  Click to add this event to your calendar
Date Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Time 10:00 am  - 10:50 am CDT
Where Room G-4 Rolla Building
Event Type Lectures & Seminars
Presenter Gordon Stangler
Sponsored by Mathematics and Statistics Department
Contact Dr. Matt Insall
Description Prime numbers play an integral role as the building blocks of mathematics and as solutions to equations you don't want others to be able to solve, for example, encryption problems. A brief history of mathematical and physical cryptography will be discussed, as well as recent encryption schemes and the importance of large prime and pseudoprime numbers to such schemes.
Time Scales Seminar: "Derivation of the Kalman filter using the Wiener-Hopf equation"  Click to add this event to your calendar
Date Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Time 4:00 pm  - 4:50 pm CDT
Where Room G-5 Rolla Building
Event Type Lectures & Seminars
Presenter Nick Wintz
Sponsored by Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Contact Martin Bohner
More http://web.mst.edu/~bohner/seminar/ts.html
Topology/Algebra Seminar: "Introduction to Contact Algebras" (continued)  Click to add this event to your calendar
Date Thursday, October 16, 2008
Time 2:00 pm  - 3:00 pm CDT
Where Room G-4 Rolla Building
Event Type Lectures & Seminars
Presenter Dr Matt Insall
Sponsored by Mathematics and Statistics
Contact Robert Roe
Description In [1], Dimiter Vakarelov describes the concept of a contact algebra, which was introduced by Dimov and Vakarelov in [2] to help formalize a notion, championed by whitehead in [3], of "contact" between regions in space. Formally, a contact algebra is a pair A=(B, C), where B=(B,0,1,^,v,~) is a Boolean algebra, and C is a binary relation on the set B, such that the following hold:

(C1) xCy implies x>0; (C2) xC(yvz) if either xCy or xCz; (C3) xCy implies yCx; (C4) x^y>0 implies xCy.

Examples of contact algebras include the algebra of regular closed subsets of a topological space, and the algebra of regular open subsets of a topological space.

This kind of "pointless" topology, or "pointless" geometry, has applications in artificial intelligence and knowledge representation, via qualitative spatial reasoning, and represents a fertile area of interaction between classical Boolean algebra, topology and logic.

[1] D. Vakarelov, Region-Basel Theory of Space: Algebras of Regions, Represent at ion Theory, and Logics, In: Mathematical Problems from Applied Logic. Logics for the XX-Ist Century. II. Edited by Dov M. Gabbay et. al. Int'l Mathematical Series, 5, Springer, 2007.
[2] G. Dimov and D. Vakarelov, Contact algebras and region-based theory of space. A proximity approach. I, Fundam. Inform. (2006)
[3] A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. New York, MacMillan, 1929.