Amherst College Math Colloquium

The Amherst College Math Colloquium is a series of talks for undergraduates.

All are welcome! The talks are intended to be mostly accessible to students who have taken calculus, although they may also provide a preview of deeper waters. The colloquium talks are usually one hour long (50 + 10 minutes for questions). We usually have a 30 minute pre-talk small gathering (with snacks and refreshments) beforehand.

The 2023-2024 colloquium is organized by Ivan Contreras and Nathan Pflueger.

Upcoming talks

Thursday, October 5, 2023
4:00-5:00, SMUD 206. Pre-talk refreshments at 3:45 in Room 208.

Curvature and polyhedra
Jake Levinson (Université de Montréal)

Monday, October 16, 2023
4:00-5:00, SCCE E110 (Lipton Lecture Hall)

Art Benjamin: Mathemagician
Art Benjamin (Harvey Mudd College)

Wednesday, October 25, 2023
4:00-5:00


Wednesday, November 1, 2023
4:00-5:00


Thursday, November 9, 2023

Data Cohesion: From Similarity Comparisons to Clustering (joint Math/Stat colloquium)
Kate Moore (Amherst)

Tuesday, November 14, 2023


Past talks

Wednesday, September 20, 2023
4:00-5:00, SMUD 206. Pre-talk refreshments at 3:45 in Room 208.

The $abc$ Conjecture: An Introduction
Rob Benedetto (Amherst)

Tuesday, March 28, 2023
4:30pm-5:30pm, Seeley Mudd 206

Different Differences: A Primer on NSFD Methods For Solving Differential Equations
Ron Buckmire (Occidental)

Wednesday, November 2, 2022
4:30-5:30, SMUD 206

Recent advances in the study of flow polytopes of graphs
Alejandro Morales (U. Mass)

Wednesday, October 26, 2022
4:30 PM, SMUD 206

A guided walk through object oriented statistical machine learning
Johan VanHorebeek (CIMAT)

Thursday, April 1, 2021
5:30pm-6:30pm, via Zoom

Towards a coarse theory of quantum spin systems
Bowen Wang (2018 Amherst graduate)

Thursday, March 18, 2021
5:30pm-6:30pm, via Zoom

The Mystery of Colliding Blocks
Dan Velleman (Professor Emeritus, Amherst College)

Tuesday, September 29, 2020
5:30pm-6:30pm, via Zoom

Wallpaper Patterns and Life on the Klein Bottle
Patricia Cahn (Smith College)

Tuesday, September 15, 2020
6:00pm-7:00pm, via Zoom

Stranger Things (in Math)
Ivan Contreras (Amherst)

Thursday, February 20, 2020
4:30pm, Seeley Mudd 206

Symmetry, Almost
Amanda Folsom (Amherst)

Thursday, February 6, 2020
4:30pm, Seeley Mudd 207

Unsupervised Clustering, Harmonic Analysis, and Applications
James M. Murphy (Tufts University)

Thursday, November 21, 2019
4:30pm, Seeley Mudd 206

A fun optimization problem
Kasso Okoudjou (U. Maryland)

Thursday, November 14, 2019
4:30pm-5:30pm, SMUD 204

Comparing Songs without Listening: From Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science to Music and Back Again
Katie Kinnaird (Smith College)

Wednesday, November 6, 2019
4:30pm, Seeley Mudd 206

Turán's Problem and an Introduction to Sums of Squares
Annie Raymond (UMass Amherst)

Thursday, October 24, 2019
4:30pm, Seeley Mudd 206

Knot for Everyday Purposes
David Freund (Harvard University)

Thursday, October 10, 2019
4:30pm, Seeley Mudd 206

A Beginner's Introduction to the Mandelbrot Set
Rob Benedetto (Amherst)

Thursday, September 26, 2019
4:30pm, Seeley Mudd 206

Mathematical Physics and the Shape of Graphs
Ivan Contreras (Amherst)