Not Steve Jobs: the man who started the first personal computing revolution

Speaker: 

Keith Devlin

Speaker Link: 

http://profkeithdevlin.com/

Institution: 

Stanford University

Time: 

Thursday, April 12, 2012 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Host: 

Alessandra Pantano (she/her/hers)

Location: 

Natural Sciences 2 RM 1201

Abstract: The first personal computing revolution took place not in Silicon Valley in the 1980s but in Pisa in the 13th Century. The medieval counterpart to Steve Jobs was a young Italian called Leonardo, better known today by the nickname Fibonacci. Thanks to a recently discovered manuscript in a library in Florence, the story of how this little known genius came to launch the modern commercial world can now be told.

Based on Devlin’s latest book The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetical Revolution (Walker & Co, July 2011) and his co-published companion e-book Leonardo and Steve: The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years.

Click here for more information.

Not Steve Jobs: the man who started the first personal computing revolution

Dr. Keith Devlin is a mathematician at Stanford University in California, a co-founder and Executive Director of the university's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media Xresearch network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences.

Survival times of Contact Processes on Trees.

Speaker: 

Thomas Mountford

Institution: 

EPFL

Time: 

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 - 11:00am

Location: 

Rowland Hall 306

We consider the time for extinction for a contact process on a tree of bounded degree as the number of vertices tends to infinity. We show that
uniformly over all such trees the extinction time tends to infinity as the
exponential of the number of vertices if the infection parameter is strictly above the critical value for the one dimensional contact process.
An application to the contact process on NSW graphs is given.

Professor Edriss Titi named a SIAM Fellow, Class of 2012

Congratulations to Professor Edriss Titi who was named a SIAM Fellow for his work on analytical and computational studies of nonlinear partial differential equations with applications to fluid mechanics and geophysics. Fellowship is an honorific designation conferred on members distinguished for their outstanding contributions to the fields of applied mathematics and computational science.
   

Not Steve Jobs: The man who started the first personal computing revolution

The first personal computing revolution took place not in Silicon Valley in the 1980s but in Pisa in the 13th Century. The medieval counterpart to Steve Jobs was a young Italian called Leonardo, better known today by the nickname Fibonacci. Thanks to a recently discovered manuscript in a library in Florence, the story of how this little known genius came to launch the modern commercial world can now be told.
 

A Question of Time

Have you ever wished to go back in time to change a decision you made or perhaps to redo a math exam?  If we can associate time with a coordinate t like any spatial coordinates (x, y, z), then there is nothing stopping you from doing just that.  But unfortunately, we are not able to go back in time, so something must be different about a coordinate associated with time from that of a spatial one.  How should we think of time?  Does it even make sense to do geometry with both spatial and time coordinates together?  Come and find out how these questions are considered in the fascinating subje

Response thresholds and noise sensitivity in Polarizing Cells

Speaker: 

Bill Holmes

Institution: 

University of British Columbia

Time: 

Monday, April 2, 2012 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Host: 

Qing Nie

Location: 

RH 306

Chemotactic cells can be either sensitive or insensitive to noisy environments. Some require sufficiently large heterogeneous stimuli to respond, others undergo random motion in the absence of directed stimuli, and yet others transition between the two behaviours. Motivated by recent experimental work on GTPase polarization in HeLa cells, we investigate biochemical control of response thresholds that determine these behaviours. A minimal model of GTPase / Phosphoinositide interactions, developed based on these experiments, is presented. Using a new nonlinear PDE bifurcation technique, we show the presence of both threshold and instability driven patterning, map the dependence of response thresholds on experimentally probed parameters, and discuss the biological implications of model – experiment agreement. Time permitting, we will discuss the more general mathematical and biological structure responsible for this threshold control, which is not specific to the proposed biochemical network and would be conserved under different network motifs.

Pages

Subscribe to UCI Mathematics RSS