News & Events

The University of New Orleans Department of Mathematics offers seminars and colloquia concerning various areas of mathematics and statistics, as well as undegraduate level talks in the math club.

• Here is the math instructor schedule in the tutor center for Fall 2009.

• Here is a list of recent Freshman math education initiatives by the Mathematics Department in Fall 2009.

• Mathematics Department Colloquium: David Mobley (Dept. of Chemistry, UNO) talks about "Insights from calculation of hydration and binding free energies" on Wednesday, September 9, from 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm in Math building 100. (Coffee and cookies in the math mailroom precede the talk at 12:30 pm.)

• Delta-Epsilon Math Club: Sasha Shestko (UNO) talks about "Making Functions Functional: Job Opportunities for Math Majors" on Monday, April 20, from 12:30 pm - 1:20 pm in Math building 100. (Free pizza and drinks.)

• Delta-Epsilon Math Club: Cory Redfern (UNO) talks about "Funny business with photons" on Monday, March 9, from 12:30 pm - 1:20 pm in Math building 100. (Free pizza and drinks.)

• Mathematics Department Seminar: Yuexiao Dong (Penn State) talks about "Dimension reduction for non-elliptically distributed predictors" on Tuesday, December 2, from 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm in Math building 219.

  Full abstract: Sufficient dimension reduction methods often require stringent conditions on the joint distribution of the predictor, or, when such conditions are not satisfied, rely on marginal transformation or reweighting to fulfill them approximately. For example, a typical di- mension reduction method would require the predictor to have elliptical or even mul- tivariate normal distribution. We reformulate the commonly used dimension reduction methods, via the notion of "central solution space", so as to circumvent the requirement such strong assumptions, while at the same time preserve the desirable properties of the classical methods, such as sqrt{n}-consistency and asymptotic normality.

  Most methods in the sufficient dimension reduction literature are based on inverse con- ditional moments. Those methods can be further divided into two categories: first-order methods that depend on moments or inverse conditional moments such as E(XY^k) and E(X|Y ); second-order methods that depend on moments or inverse conditional moments such as E(XY^k), E(X|Y ), E(Y^kX^T ), and E(XX^T |Y ), where k is an integer. First- order methods include Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR; Li, 1991), Ordinary Least Squares (OLS; Li and Duan, 1989), Parametric Inverse Regression (PIR; Bura and Cook, 2001), Canonical Correlation (Fung et al., 2002), and Kernel Inverse Regression (KIR; Zhu and Fang, 1996; Ferre and Yao, 2005). Second-order methods include Principal Hessian Di- rections (PHD; Li, 1992 and Cook, 1998b), Sliced Average Variance Estimator (SAVE; Cook and Weisberg, 1991), SIRII (Li, 1991), Contour Regression (Li et al., 2005), and Directional Regression (DR; Li and Wang, 2007). The e±cacy of aforementioned meth- ods relies on the elliptical distribution assumption of the predictor X. The main focus of this presentation is to generalize all these methods to work for non-elliptically distributed predictors. The new methods will be compared with existing methods by simulation, and the results show a significant improvement over traditional dimension reduction methods when the elliptical assumption is violated.

• Fall 2008 Meeting of the Louisiana Chapter of the American Statistical Association on December 5 from 10:00 am - 4:00 pm in Earl K. Long Library 407.

• Mathematics Department Seminar: Jiu Ding (U. Southern Mississippi) talks about "Dynamical Geometry: From Order to Chaos and Sierpinski Pedal Triangles" on Wednesday, November 12, from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm in Math building 229.

  Full abstract: We give an introduction to discrete dynamical geometry, an iter- ated dynamical system of geometric gures, and we present some joint research with Xin-Min Zhang of the University of South Alabama and Zhao Li of Fudan University in China.

  A regular behavior is observed for some kinds of interated triangles and cyclic polygons, and it can be proved via the Perron-Frobenius theory of nonnegative matrices. But an irregular or chaotic behav- ior appears when a sequence of pedal triangles of a given triangle are generated. Using pedal triangles, Zhang constructed new fractals called Sierpinski pedal triangles since they are reduced to the famous Sierpinski triangle when the initial triangle is equilateral. The fractal dimensions of Sierpinski pedal triangles can be calculated by solving a nonlinear equation. We prove that the well-known dimension ln 3= ln 2 of the Sierpinski triangle is the strict global minimum of the dimension function dened for the Sierpinski pedal triangles.

  This talk serves as a sightseeing on the way from order to chaos in the garden of dynamical geometry, and it also provides a way of looking at the classic Euclidean geometry from a modern mathematics point of view.

• Delta-Epsilon Math Club: Harris Lam (UNO) talks about "Fun with Matlab" on Friday, November 14, from noon - 1 pm in Math building 200. (Free pizza and drinks.)

• Delta-Epsilon Math Club: Cory Redfern (UNO) talks about "Factoring numbers" on Friday, October 17, from noon - 1 pm in Math building 110. (Free pizza and drinks.)

• Delta-Epsilon Math Club: Jonathan Joseph (UNO) talks about "Stochastic modeling of stream flow measurements in the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers" on Thursday, September 25, from 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm in Math building 105. (Free pizza and drinks.)