The Center for Mathematics at Notre Dame (CMND) hosts an annual thematic summer school program each year. A total of 36 students from universities across the United States and abroad, attended this year’s undergraduate session held May 20-24. This theme for this year’s program was motivic invariants and singularities.
“My calculus professor suggested that I might be interested in this program,” explained Notre Dame student Cecelia Nguyen. “I attended because I wanted to explore what other subjects were out there besides the ones that relate directly to the pre-med route. I wanted to learn more about mathematics and its applications as well.”
Three speakers taught the students throughout the week. Margaret Robinson, professor of mathematics at Mt. Holyoke College, presented an introduction to Igusa local zeta functions with p-adic numbers and p-adic integration. Dustin Cartwright, postdoctorate fellow at Yale University, discussed tropical geometry, a method of studying algebraic varieties through their tropicalizations. Shaowei Lin, from A*STAR, the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore, discussed singular learning theories, which is a powerful geometric approach to analyze big data at a deeper level.
“I attended the program last year and had a great time. The program is a great opportunity to gain exposure to more advanced math, and meet fellow math majors from all over the country,” said Gautam Goel, an applied mathematics and computer science major at Georgia Institute of Technology. “The program helps give a taste of what math research is like, and what sorts of topics researchers are working on. This is helpful when trying to gain a sense of what graduate school is like.”
The undergraduate session is one of three sessions in the Center for Mathematics summer program. The graduate and postdoc session was held May 27-31 and the conference session will be held June 3-7.