Department News & Events
The 2019 CUMC at Queen’s promises to be a high-quality, stimulating gathering for undergraduate math students. Check out the website for more information. Registration will open soon.
This workshop will bring together researchers working on the field of structured population ecology with expertise in one or more of the following three focuses of the workshop:
Prof. Eleonora Cinti (Università di Bologna, Italy) will teach a 5-day mini-course aimed at graduate students and junior researchers at the intersection of Analysis and Geometry.
Dr. Cinti earned her Ph.D in 2010 and since then has worked at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, the Weierstrass Institute in Berlin, and various Italian universities (Pavia, Bologna, Torino). Eleonora Cinti's research focuses on nonlocal partial differential equations, geometric measure theory, and calculus of variations.
The mini-course will be structured as follows:
If you want to attend the mini-course, please email nonlocal19@queensu.ca.
A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole.
Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible.
The remarkable photo, showing a halo of dust and gas 500 million trillion km from Earth, was released on Wednesday.
Source: The BBC
Bahman Gharesifard has been awarded the CAIMS-PIMS Early Career Award, jointly awarded by the Canadian Applied & Industrial Math Society and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences . This award comes with an invitation to speak at the CAIMS Annual Meeting, to be held in Whistler BC June 9-13 2019.
Congratulations Bahman!
The first annual Canadian Undergraduate Conference on Artificial Intelligence took place on March 9th, 2019. Backed by QMIND (whose members include Mathematics and Engineering students) and a strong Queen’s community, the event marked its debut on the national stage with delegations from Queen’s University, McGill University, University of Toronto, Ryerson University, and University of Manitoba. In total, over 200 student delegates, industry leaders, and sponsor representatives came together for the day to discuss the state of Canadian AI.
Time: 10:50-11:10 a.m. Place: Fields Institute, Room 230
Speaker: Siobhain Broekhoven, (Queen’s University)
Title: Sex, math and games: Transitioning students to the next level with recreational math.
Abstract: Successful transitions enrich the student experience whether the transition is from elementary to secondary school, secondary to tertiary education, or tertiary to the work force or academia. Why is it that females (which studies show have equal ability to males) are not transitioning into STEM fields at similar rates? This CMS speciality program at Queen’s University is designed to motivate and engage this underrepresented demographic. This talk looks at the design of sessions that are low floor high ceiling, experiential, more collaborative (and less competitive) that lead to a growth mindset; relieving math anxiety; and connecting mathematics to current careers, the arts and real world applications —all the while building community.
Siobhain Broekhoven is an Intermediate-Senior math, physics and Special Education Specialist with Algonquin Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, currently working with youth at risk. She is also the developer and director of Math Quest, Queen’s Math Camp for Girls, a summer program of the Department of Math and Stats at Queen’s University, sponsored by the Canadian Math Society. The program runs for a week in August each summer. Her interests lie in helping students to build resilience and develop a growth mindset.
Source: The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences
Three researchers, two of them Canadian, have won the world's top award in computer science for developing the ability of computers to learn like humans, by imitating the human brain and how it functions using networks of "neurons."
That allows computers to acquire new skills by looking at lots of examples and finding and recognizing patterns, as humans do.
Machine learning — based on "deep learning" and "neural networks" — has led to the development of artificial intelligence that now powers everyday web and smartphone applications from voice, image and facial recognition to language translation. It's increasingly being used in more complicated tasks like generating art, creating text and diagnosing cancer from images.
Source: The CBC
The ‘Your Academic Success (YAS)’ survey is part of a longitudinal cohort study being conducted by the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s University that aims to look at how undergraduate students are thriving academically. The findings of the study will help inform the design and delivery of key academic support services.
The survey will be open until March 25, 2019, takes approximately 20 minutes to complete, and all answers are confidential. Students who fill out the survey can choose to enter a draw to win one of 30 $30 Campus Bookstore gift cards.
A Google employee has broken the world record for calculating pi just in time for the mind-bogglingly long number's special day.
Emma Haruka Iwao spent four months working on the project in which she calculated pi to 31.4 trillion digits.
Pi holds a special place in the realm of math. It's an irrational number that continues infinitely without repetition. You calculate it by dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter.
Iwao did her number crunching primarily from Google's office in Osaka, Japan, where she works at as a developer and advocate for Google Cloud. Fittingly, she used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to generate the enormously long number. It's the first pi record calculated on the cloud.
Read more here: San Francisco (CNN Business)
