Short Courses
In addition to the student talks and plenary sessions, we are offering a series
of short courses in conjunction with the conference. These courses will be offered
during the afternoon of Friday, April 22, 2016 at 1:00pm. The short courses are
open to all registrants, and there is no need to pre-register for any particular
coruse. Upon arrival at the conference, you may choose in which course, if any, you
would like to participate. The title and descriptions of each course are given
below.
Mathematical Celebrity Sightings
Dr. Mike McDaniel, Aquinas College
When a research mathematician runs into famous numbers unexpectedly,
the research gains excitement. In this session, we will find famous
numbers when counting chord diagrams, when calculating HOMFLYPT
weights of chord diagrams (two problems from knot theory), and in
calculations of hyperbolic length and hyperbolic area (two problems
from hyperbolic geometry.) The participants will get introduced to the
relevant knot theory and geometry. Dr. McDaniel will then give the
research questions to the participants and the hunt is on. Like
paparazzi at the Oscars, participants will see celebrities.
Except they're mathematical celebrities. And you'll need a calculator
to see them.
NTRU: How Abstract Algebra Is Keeping Your Data Safe
Dr. Timothy All, Wabash College
Cryptography has been with us for some time. Julius Caesar was known to
have encrypted his private correspondence by replacing each letter in his message
with a letter some fixed distance down the alphabet. For modern cryptographic
needs, ciphers such as Caesar’s aren’t sufficient. After all, if Amazon tells everyone to
encrypt their credit card numbers by simply shifting the digits by some fixed amount,
we’d be in a heap of trouble.
In the modern era, we need public-key cryptosystems. The main feature of these
systems is the construction of key pairs called the public-key and private-key. The
public-key is used for encryption while the private-key is used for decryption. What
makes a public-key cryptosystem secure is the relative difficulty in computing the
privately held private-key from the publicly available public-key.
Amazingly, mathematics that was originally explored for aesthetic or founda-
tional purposes is now being applied to construct these public-key cryptosystems.
This mini-course will focus on NTRU, a relatively new public-key cryptosystem
whose back-bone is built on ring theory and, unlike RSA and systems based on
the theory of elliptic curves, NTRU is not known to be vulnerable to quantum-
computing. We plan to discuss the background material needed to understand how
the encryption/decryption process works, and the security of the system or lack
thereof in some circumstances.
Introduction to Data Science
Dr. Mark Daniel Ward, Purdue University
We will have a hands-on overview of some of the tools that data scientists use for
working with data, including large data sets. The workshop topics can be slightly
flexible and open to discussion, depending on the interests of the participants.
At a minimum, we will introduce students to R and RStudio, data visualization, and
perhaps some tools for scraping and parsing XML directly from the web and processing
the scraped data in R. All participants are encoraged to bring a laptop...and to be
excited to learn about some of the introductory nuts and bolts of data science.
No computational background is needed for this workshop.
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