Week 7 email
Hey everyone!
Sorry, it’s a long email this week, there are a lot of announcements.
Tl;dr:
- AGM and SUMO plug
- AGM
- Week 7 Rewiring Session
- Game Theory Study Group - Session 4
- Lunchtime lecture - Dimension of self-affine sets (Amlan Banaji)
- Coding together in Lean
- Institute of Mathematics and Applications Student Membership Weekly problem
Our AGM is this week (free wine and pizza). So depending on discussions with our next President, this may be my last weekly email. With that in mind, and in a blatant attempt to attract some of you into running for a position, I should say that being a part of SUMS committee for the past 2 and half years has been one of the highlights of my time at uni so far. It’s allowed me the opportunity to meet and work alongside a lot of lovely hardworking people.
My favourite memory is probably from SUMO last year. We allowed invigilated food and social breaks during the event and I loved the opportunity to meet and speak with friendly faces from other universities, a number of whom are now contributing to the competition this year. We do our best to ensure that whoever takes that paper, there’ll be a problem or two that you’ll enjoy. It’s one of the few competitions where you compete in teams with friends. Don’t miss the opportunity to come along!
Without further ado, here’s our normal list.
AGM
Our Annual General Meeting, there’ll be free wine and pizza. We’ll briefly summarise the past year, elect our new committee and vote on any constitutional changes.
If you’d like to run for a position they’re listed below.
- President
- Vice-President
- Treasurer
- Secretary
- Social Representative
- Publicity Representative
- First Year Representative
- Postgraduate Representative
- Problem Curator
- Events and Outreach Officer
- Technical Officer
- Lecture Organiser
- General Committee Member
- To nominate yourself, just send a short statement to us (sums@st-andrews.ac.uk) with:
- A brief introduction about yourself,
- Which position(s) you’d like to nominate yourself for,
- Why you’d like the role(s)/would be a good fit for the role(s)
If there’s anyone you think would be a good fit, then you can send them an anonymous nudge using this form.
Where: Physics Building Café
When: Friday, 20:00-22:00
Facebook link: https://fb.me/e/6qnz0W36v
Week 7 Rewiring session
Rewiring sessions are designed to encourage and promote the spirit of mathematical playfulness and curiosity. We meet and attendees suggest questions or ideas to play around with. These can be anything and often take the form of investigating some previously studied area without looking at pre-existing literature.
Where: Maths Tutorial Room 3B
When: Friday, 16:00-17:00
Facebook link: https://fb.me/e/2JcGDfjsY
Game Theory Study Group - Session 4
Our Game Theory study group continues. Each week we will do a set amount of reading and meet to discuss the previous week’s content. Most sessions will begin with a short presentation from a member of the study group on the reading.
The book is ‘Game Theory: A Playful Introduction’ by Deborah A. Kent and Matthew Jared DeVos.
In this session, we will hope to review sections 4.1 and 4.2 of the book, thus beginning the study of Hackenbush and Partizan Games. Rhys will present a brief overview of the content, and then we will engage in some discussion and get to play some games.
Where: Maths Tutorial Room 1B
When: Monday, 16:00-17:00
Facebook link: https://fb.me/e/29WpYPdE1
Lunchtime Lecture - Dimensions of self-affine sets (Amlan Banaji)
This week’s lunchtime lecture will be given by final-year PhD student Amlan Banaji.
Here is an abstract:
Fractals are objects with intricate and often beautiful structure, and they frequently appear in nature. A particularly important class of fractals are called self-affine sets, which are made up of scaled-down and distorted copies of themselves. One can try to understand how they fill up space at small scales by calculating their dimensions, and there are there are several open problems about this. I will describe some of the research that has been done in this area since the 1980s, and touch on some recent work by members of the St Andrews analysis research group.
Where: Maths Lecture Theatre D
When: Thursday at 13:00
Facebook link: https://fb.me/e/ZPQH0Twn
Coding together in Lean
Do you want a computer to check your solutions to problem sheets? The interactive theorem prover, Lean, might help you do that.* SUMS committee member Peiran, with help from his fellow postgrad Jack, is organising weekly local gatherings of people with interest in the Lean theorem prover. At the event, everyone will be free to explore Lean on their own and discuss with each other, although Peiran will start the first gathering in Week 7 with a little demo. You can just drop in on the day, but it would be very helpful if you could fill in this survey. No prior knowledge of Lean is necessary, but a computer you can code on might be. You can learn more about Lean and the community of contributors and enthusiasts on the Lean community website. There are lots of learning materials available online, links to some of which can be found on the Learning Lean page.
* You may have to teach it the lecture notes first!
Where: Gateway Building Lecture Room 2 (GWY:319)
When: Tuesday 7 March 16:00 - 18:00
Institute of Mathematics and Applications - Student Membership
We’re looking to get sponsorship from the IMA. For details on the IMA and what they offer undergraduates, see here.
If you are a member or end up being one. Then please let us know (so we can tell them, if we think it might help us get money).
That’s it for this week.
Sincerely,
Dan Roebuck
President of SUMS
The weekly problem is attached to the email.
Find all continuous functions f, g and h as follows:
\[f(a+b) = f(a) + f(b), \, f: \mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\] \[g(a+b) = g(a) g(b), \, g: \mathbb{R}^+ \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^+\] \[h(a+b) = \frac{h(a)+h(b)}{1-h(a)h(b)}, h: \mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\] \[\text{Where } \mathbb{R}^+ = \{x \in \mathbb{R} : x > 0\}\]Hint for last part: Google ‘inverse tan addition formula’.