Colloquia

Professor Elizabeth A. Burroughs 4/5/2012

Research in Professional Development for Grades K-8 Mathematics Classroom
Coaches

Date: 4/5/2012
Time: 2:30-3:30 PM
Place: 422 Armstrong Hall

This talk will provide a description of the design, implementation, and evaluation of a professional development course for grades K-8 mathematics classroom coaches in seven states across the western United States. The course is one component of a larger research project studying the knowledge held by effective mathematics coaches. The professional development is centered upon standards-based mathematics practice and eight themes aboutknowledge held by coaches. The course is a 45-hour summer residential course attended by approximately 60 coaches across two summers. The coaches are randomly assigned to attend one of two summers to allow for an experimental design with a treatment and a control group. The results document a significant change in coaching knowledge held by participants. The results from this project provide a research-based model for a professional development course for mathematics classroom coaches.

Date, Location:
2012-04-02

Dr. Minchul Kang 3/19/2012

Mathematical modeling of fluorescence microscopy and its applications to
cancer systems biology

Date: 3/19/2012
Time: 4:30-5:30 PM
Place: 422 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

All living cells sense, integrate and respond to their environment by a complex system of communication known as cell signaling, which is mostly mediated by protein-protein interactions. Therefore, to determine proteins’ binding partners and binding rate constants are crucial steps to understand cell signaling. While high-throughput methods to screen binary protein binding pairs are now well-established, still no genomic scale kinetic rate calibration tools are available. To this end, simple, accessible yet accurate methods to measure kinetic constants under physiological condition were sought by a combination of mathematical modeling and fluorescence microscopy techniques such as Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching (FRAP) and Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET). In addition, a further application of this research to cancer systems biology will be discussed.

Date, Location:
2012-03-19

Professor Mikhail Feldman 3/16/2012

University of Wisconsin Madison Professor, Mikhail Feldman, will host a
colloquium on Lagrangian Solutions of Semigeostrophic
System and all are invited to attend.

Date: 3/16/2012
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Place: 315 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

Semigeostrophic system is a model of large-scale
atmospheric/ocean flows. I will discuss some
results on existence and properties of weak Lagrangian solutions in
physical space. The approach is based
on Monge-Kantorovich mass transport theory, and on theory of transport
equations for BV vector fields.
Open problems will be also discussed.

Date, Location:
2012-03-08

Dr. Yan Hao 3/8/2012

A tale of two stochastic models

Date: 3/8/2012
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Place: 315 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

Modeling and analysis of biological phenomena require techniques and tools from various disciplines. Though deterministic models have been broadly used and proved to be a powerful tool in the study of mathematical biology, stochastic models often compliment them on capturing individual behavior and effects of noise, molecular fluctuations and random environmental changes for example. In this talk, I will present two examples to show when and how stochastic models can be applied to study biological problems. In the first example, an agent based model is used to study resource sharing rules among human populations under realistic ecological conditions and revealed that simple sharing is an effective risk reducing strategy that plays an important role in maintaining human populations. In the second example, Markov chains and stochastic differential equations are applied to model the cardiac calcium dynamics which is crucial for cardiac rhythm regulation and is known to be the key to understanding many cardiac diseases.

Date, Location:
2012-03-05

Dr. Leobardo Rosales 2/24/2012

The single and two-valued minimal surface equation.

Date: 2/24/2012
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Place: 315 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

The two-valued minimal surface equation is a degenerate PDE
used to produce examples of stable minimal immersions with branch
points. In this talk, drawing analogies from the minimal surface
equation, we investigate questions of existence, regularity, and
rigidity of solutions.

Date, Location:
2012-02-24

Dr. Kevin Milans 2/22/2012

Sparse Ramsey Hosts

Date: 2/22/2012
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Place: 422 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

In Ramsey Theory, we study conditions under which every partition of a large structure yields a part with additional structure. For example, Van der Waerden's theorem states that every s-coloring of the integers contains arbitrarily long monochromatic arithmetic progressions, and the Hales--Jewett Theorem guarantees that every game of tic-tac-toe in high dimensions has a winner. Ramsey's Theorem implies that for any target graph G, every s-coloring of the edges of some sufficiently large host graph contains a monochromatic copy of G. In Ramsey's Theorem, the host graph is dense (in fact complete). We explore conditions under which the host graph can be sparse and still force a monochromatic copy of G.
We write H→sG if every s-edge-coloring of H contains a monochromatic copy of G. The s-color Ramsey number of G is the minimum k such that some k-vertex graph H satisfies H→sG. The degree Ramsey number of G is the minimum k such that some graph H with maximum degree k satisfies H→sG. Chvátal, Rödl, Szemerédi, and Trotter proved that the Ramsey number of bounded-degree graphs grows only linearly, sharply contrasting the exponential growth that generally occurs when the bounded-degree assumption is dropped. We are interested in the analogous degree Ramsey question: is the s-color degree Ramsey number of G bounded by some function of s and the maximum degree of G? We resolve this question in the affirmative when G is restricted to a family of graphs that have a global tree structure; this family includes all outerplanar graphs. We also investigate the behavior of the s-color degree Ramsey number as s grows. This talk includes results from three separate projects that are joint with P. Horn, T. Jiang, B. Kinnersley, V. Rödl, and D. West.

Date, Location:
2012-02-22

Dr. Flor Espinoza Hidalgo 2/21/2012

Analysis of the Organization and Dynamics of Proteins in Cell Membranes

Date: 2/21/2012
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Place: 315 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

Cells communicate with the outside world through membrane receptors that recognize one of many possible stimuli (hormones, antibodies, peptides) in the extracellular environment and translate this information to intracellular responses. Changes in the organization and composition of the plasma membrane are critical to transmembrane signal transduction, so there is great interest in understanding the organization of membrane proteins in resting cells and in tracking their dynamic reorganization during signaling. Problems in signaling networks are important in understanding many diseases including cancer and asthma.

Our protein of interest is the IgE high affinity receptor FceRI, found in mast cells and basophils. The activation of this receptor starts when IgE bound to FceRI is crosslinked by multivalent antigens, initiating a tyrosine kinase signaling cascade that triggers histamine release and other preformed inflammatory mediators that are stored in cytoplasmic granules.

In this talk, we present some results of our analysis of biological data on the distribution and mobility of this receptor during signaling. The data analyzed are from Janet Oliver’s Lab (STMC). First, we will present the results of our clustering analysis of high resolution electron microscopy images (static data). We focus on the analysis of the organization of the IgE-FceRI after crosslinking with the multivalent antigen, DNP-BSA. The data were generated using gold particles of size 5nm as labels to identify the location of the receptors in RBL-2H3 mast cell membranes at fixed times after stimulation. In the clustering analysis we used the dendrogram command from Matlab in our hierarchical clustering and dendrogram algorithm (HCDA). This algorithm gives an intrinsic distance number, that provides the distance for the maximum number of clusters in the biological data. Then, we compare this number to the number provided by randomly generated data for the same number of receptors in each experiment. This ratio is called the clustering ratio. It is this ratio that quantifies clustering. The HCDA algorithm also provides, number of clusters and sizes, giving more detailed information about the data. Next, we will present the analysis of real time fluorescence microscopy data (dynamic data), that track the temporal behavior of IgE-FceRI after being stimulated by different doses of the multivalent antigen, DNP-BSA. These

data were generated using quantum dots (QD) of sizes 5-10nm as labels to track the positions of the receptors in time in RBL-2H3 mast cell membranes. One of the restrictions of QDs is that they blink. As a result, the data sets have missing positions. Our analysis of dynamic data algorithm (ADDA) takes cares of this limitation. For these data, we analyzed changes in the standard deviation of the jump lengths and quantified changes in jump lengths with different stimulus.

Date, Location:
2012-02-21

Dr. Hehui Wu 2/20/2012

Longest Cycles in Graphs with Given Independence Number and Connectivity.

Date: 2/20/2012
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Place: 422 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

A vertex cut of a connected graph is a set of vertices whose removal renders the graph disconnected. The connectivity of a
graph is the size of the smallest vertex cut. An independent set of a graph is a set of vertices such that between any two vertices in the set,
there is no edge connecting them. The independence number is the size of the largest independent set. A cycle is spanning or Hamiltonian
if it visits all the vertices.

The Chv\'atal--Erd\H{o}s Theorem states that every graph whose connectivity
is at least its independence number has a spanning cycle. In 1976, Fouquet and
Jolivet conjectured an extension: If $G$ is an $n$-vertex $k$-connected graph
with independence number $a$, and $a \ge k$, then $G$ has a cycle of length
at least $\frac{k(n+a-k)}{a}$. We prove this conjecture. This is joint work with Suil O and Douglas B. West.

Date, Location:
2012-02-20

Dr. Tuoc Phan 2/15/12

Navier-Stokes Equations in Critical Spaces: Existence and Stability of Steady State Solutions

Date: 2/15/2012
Time: 3:30-4:30 PM
Place: 315 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

Abstract. In this talk, I will briefly derive the Navier-Stokes equations which is the most fundamental equations in fluid mechanics. I then discuss my recent results on the uniqueness existence of solutions to the stationary Navier-Stokes equations with small singular external forces belonging to a critical space. To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest critical space that is currently available for this kind of existence result. The stability of the steady state solutions in such spaces is also obtained by a series of sharp estimates for resolvents of a singularly perturbed operator and the corresponding semigroup. Some related results concerning the Cauchy problem for the non-stationary Navier Stokes equations will be also addressed.
The talk is based on the joint work with N. C. Phuc (LSU).

Date, Location:
2012-02-15

Dr. Rong Luo 2/14/2012

Dr. Luo will present Map-coloring, Edge-coloring and Vizings Conjectures.

Date: 2/14/2012
Time: 1:30-2:30 PM
Place: 422 Armstrong Hall
*Refreshments will be served at 3:00PM in 310 Armstrong Hall.

A graph is a set of vertices and a set of edges that connect pairs of vertices. An edge coloring of a graph is an assignment of colors to the edges of the graph so that any two edges sharing a common endvertex receive different colors. Edge coloring was first studied by Tait in 1880 as an approach to attack the well-known Map 4-Coloring conjecture. Vizing’s theorem classifies the simple graphs into two classes, Class one graphs and Class two graphs. However, it is NP-hard to determine whether a graph is in Class one or two. In late 1960s, Vizing proposed several conjectures to study the “barely” Class two graphs (critical graphs). Those conjectures are fundamental problems in the area of edge coloring. In the last ten years, there are lots of progresses on those conjectures. In this talk, I will first talk about the relation between Map Coloring and Edge Coloring and then survey the progresses on Vizing’s conjectures.

Date, Location:
2012-02-14