November 07, 2012

The annual MAA (Mathematical Association of America) North Carolina State Dinner will be held this year at Davidson College:

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012, 6:00 - 8:30 p.m.
Lilly Family Gallery, Chambers Building

Speaker:  Professor Jane Hawkins,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title:  Coding, Symbolic Dynamics, and Automata: 
Efforts to Simplify the Complex World

Specifics:
Dinner will be $20 for faculty and $10 for students.  Please, mail in this form or email your reservation by Monday, Nov. 26, to domolinek@davidson.edu.
The dinner and lecture will be in the Lilly Family Gallery in Chambers Building on Davidson's campus.  You may park in the Baker Sports Complex Parking Lot and walk around the stadium to the domed central building (Chambers).  The center entrance, through the columns, will go directly into the Lilly Family Gallery. 
Directions and maps:  To reach the parking lot from I77, Davidson Exit 30, go east until the road (Griffith St) ends at Main St.  Turn right onto Main St. and then left at the traffic light onto Concord Rd.  A left turn off of Concord Rd goes down hill into the Baker Sports Complex Parking Lot.

Talk Abstract:
Nature and mathematics are incredibly complex; one approach to taming the beast of ignorance is to discretize continuous phenomena, cutting a disheveled whole into finitely many tidy regions to help with our understanding. The example we all use is the decimal expansion of a real number, each point on the uncountable real line gets boiled down to a collection of digits 0 through 9. This idea is pushed further when physical (or mathematical) processes act on the system, and the spatial proximity of a symbol to its neighbors plays a role, as does the timing. Hadamard, Turing, von Neumann and Wolfram are a few mathematicians who believed that complex changing systems can be analyzed in this finite way, and in doing so changed mathematics.  We give an overview of how and why we use these techniques with examples, and give an application of cellular automata to viral spread.

Professor Jane Hawkins is known for her research in the fields of ergodic theory, dynamical systems, and complex analysis; for her leadership in AMS (American Mathematical Society) governance where she is currently Treasurer; and for her teaching, including 15 years of talks or courses at the George Washington University Summer Program for Women in Math. Dr. Hawkins has an A.B. from College of the Holy Cross and M.Sc. & Ph.D. from Univ. of Warwick, UK. After several years at SUNY Stony Brook, she moved to UNC Chapel Hill in 1987 and became full Professor in 1993. Her visiting appointments include Duke, Cal Tech, and MSRI in Berkeley, along with invited talks in South Korea. She also works with colleagues from several North Carolina colleges!