Southwestern Undergraduate Mathematics Research Conference 2011
Northern Arizona University
Contact: Jeff L. Rushall - Jeffrey.Rushall@nau.edu.
SUnMaRC 2011 will take place on March 4 to March 6, 2011.
Invited Speakers
Confirmed invited speakers (in alphabetical order):
- Hiram Beltran Sanchez, University of Southern California
Will you live to be a Centenarian? Recent evidence of survival to very old age.
AbstractUnprecedented improvements in nutrition, living conditions, and medical treatments in the last century have led to very large declines in mortality rates in most countries of the world. This decline has been accompanied by an increasing likelihood of surviving to old age. Recent evidence shows that more and more people are reaching their 100th birthday in Europe and in the U.S. In this talk, we will illustrate how mathematical models allow us to get an understanding of the dynamics of mortality and survival, particularly at very advanced ages.
Hiram Beltran-Sanchez was born in Los Reyes, Michoacan, Mexico. Hiram earned a B.S. in Actuarial Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a M.S. in Mathematics from Northern Arizona University, and a Ph.D. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania.
He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Andrus Gerontology center at the University of Southern California. His research interests include the use of mathematical models in the study of population dynamics, particularly those related to mortality and survivorship, and the study of individual risk factors and their association with health and longevity. Hiram was invited as a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany from June-July in 2010.
He has delivered over 20 national and international talks, including meetings in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe.
- Steve Wilson, Northern Arizona University
Fermau's Last Theorem
AbstractWell, OK, Andrew Wiles finally proved that Fermat was right: for positive integers a, b, c, N, with N at least 3, it is impossible for a^N +b^N = c^N. But how close to being possible is it? Can we have a^N +b^N = c^N + e, where e is some (relatively) small integer? What could "small" mean here? Homer Simpson observed (twice) that e might be a small fraction of c^N. Can we do better? I truly hope so!
I'm Steve Wilson. I was born in Kansas City MO, in 1946 AD, livedin Kansas from age 0 to 11.9, moved to Prescott, AZ (Badgers Rule!) to age 18.4. I went to college at Arizona State College, which became NAU while I was there, ignoring my insistence that University of Northern Arizona would be a better title. Two years spent wearing olive drab.
Graduate school for me was the University of Washington in Seattle,where my advisor, Branko Grunbaum, showed me the most beautiful objects in the considered universe. Ph.D. at age 30 in 1976, two years in Lansing, Michigan, on a Post-Doctoral appointment at Michigan State. Two years in Pennsylvania finding and luring a mate. We moved to Flagstaff in 1980 and have been based here ever since (though there have been sabbaticals).
My main mathematical interest is in symmetry of abstract objects(polyhedra, polytopes, maps, graphs, complexes), though I pursue number theory on a recreational basis.
- Roy St. Laurent, Northern Arizona University
Talking Turkey: Statistical Issues and Research in Nonlinear Modeling of Turkey Growth
AbstractSimple linear regression (SLR) methods -- often covered in undergraduate mathematics courses -- relate a predictor variable X to a response variable Y via the equation Y = a + b*X + error, for some unknown (to-be-estimated) parameters a and b. Nonlinear regression methods extend SLR to circumstances where the response model is nonlinear in the unknown parameters, e.g., Y = a*exp(b*X) + error.
In this talk, we introduce nonlinear regression, choice of model function, and nonlinear least squares in the context of a research study of the relationship between the amount X of a supplement added to a turkey's diet and the resulting response Y, the turkey's weight after 4 weeks. We also introduce the concept of optimal design, which concerns how to design an experiment by choosing the levels of X (supplementation) ahead of time that will provide optimal information concerning the relationship between X and Y (turkey weight). Areas of mathematics discussed include: statistics, linear algebra, numerical analysis, and n-dimensional Euclidean and differential geometry.
Roy St. Laurent was born in Bay City, Michigan, home to Madonna (but not the Bay City Rollers). After working through high school in his father's peanut butter and candy store, he went to Michigan Technological University in Houghton where he completed a B.S. in Mathematics with an emphasis in Statistics in 1981. His sophomore year in college, Houghton got 365 inches of snow. This had a profound effect on him. As a result he went to the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis AND St. Paul) looking for more snow (well no, not really), where he completed a Ph.D. in Statistics with a minor in Mathematics in 1987.
Moving to the University of Michigan, Roy was a faculty member in the Department of Biostatistics where he taught, did research in statistics, and worked on a large Alzheimer's disease research project. Roy subsequently moved to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff where he has been a statistics faculty member in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics since 1994.
His statistical interests are in developing new statistical methodology particularly in nonlinear regression, regression diagnostics, method comparison studies, and quite recently nonparametric statistical methods. He has published in a variety of statistical journals including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, Biometrics, and the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics.