Fall 2021
Friday, September 10
Mathematics & Computer Science Welcome Back Picnic
Join us for pizza, snacks and drinks
Tome Hall Outdoor Classroom area
Rain Location: Tome Hall 2nd floor lounge
Tuesday, September 28
Professor Dave Richeson, Dickinson College
"A Romance of Many (and Fractional) Dimensions"
Dimension seems like an intuitive idea. We are all familiar with zero-dimensional points, one-dimensional curves, two-dimensional surfaces, and three-dimensional solids. Yet dimension is a slippery idea that took mathematicians many years to understand. We will discuss the history of dimension, which includes Cantor’s troubling discovery, the surprise of space-filling curves, the public’s infatuation with the fourth dimension, time as an extra dimension, the meaning of non-integer dimensions, and the unexpected properties of high-dimensional spaces.
Noon
Tome 115 (If you'd prefer to attend via Zoom, email millert@dickinson.edu for the link)
Pizza provided
Tuesday, November 2
Alex Nash '22, Mathematics and Computer Science major
"Real Algebraically Defined Graphs"
This past summer Alex participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. He will talk through the application process, share his experience in the program, and discuss some of the results from the experience.
For our present purposes, we will say a graph is a collection of nodes connected by lines. His reseach over the summer was focused on analyzing the properties of a specific form of graphs, referred to as Algebraically Defined Graphs. Given a function of two variables, we can create an algebraically defined graph as follows: we consider all points in the plane as nodes, and say two points are connected by a line. The core focus on his research over the summer was in determining whether different functions can produce similar graphs.
Tome 115 (or you can attend via Zoom; email millert@dickinson.edu for link)
Pizza provided beforehand (from 11:35am-Noon) at Tome Hall back patio area
Thursday, December 2
Anthony Vo '22 - Computer Science Honors Thesis Defense
"An Analysis of Object Detection Systems for the Automatic Detection and Localization of Basking Rattlesnakes in Images"
The study of how prairie rattlesnakes, a common species of reptiles across the United States, regulate their body temperature is essential to human efforts to conserve such species and maintain ecological balance. The development of object detection systems has the potential of accelerating such a study by reducing human efforts to manually detect the presence of snakes in large collections of videos and images taken by camera traps. In this paper, we experiment with YOLO, a single stage object detection model, and Faster R-CNN, a multi-stage object detection model, on a dataset of snake images taken at a site in Colorado, United States. The accuracy of each model is then evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative measures and several suggestions are made to improve the performance of the models for practical applications.
Noon
Tome 115
Pizza provided beforehand (from 11:35am-Noon) in Rector Atrium