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Math Fun Talks

The Math “Fun Talks” is a series of short seminars hosted by instructors, students (both current and former), as well as others from outside of the college. The purpose of these talks is to provide students who attend them with an understanding of how Math can actually be applied in the real world, particularly with examples not often discussed in general math courses. The talks also provide an avenue for the host to talk about topics that personally interest them with regard to mathematics.

The talks were designed to encourage students to return to in-person classes after the COVID pandemic. The Math “Fun Talks” were instituted by Mathematics Associate Professors Bryan Wilson and Rob Woodward in the Spring of 2023. Since then, attendance for the talks have grown more and more, demonstrating that students want to learn why Math matters to them and they want to see how it can actually be used.

Math “Fun Talks” are hosted every Fall and Spring semester with about 3 or 4 talks planned each semester, typically near the end of each month. Each talk is planned to last about an hour. All talks are given in-person, there is no option for tuning in online.

Next Math Fun Talk:

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Event Description:

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google revolutionized the search engine industry by fundamentally rethinking how to search for information on the web. While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, they theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships among websites. They called this algorithm PageRank; it determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

We will explore the PageRank algorithm three different ways:

  1. As a random walk on a graph.
  2. As a game where players give away all they own each turn.
  3. As a matrix which is repeatedly multiplied by itself.

The talk will end by briefly describing how to dramatically speed up the algorithm, and then use the PageRank algorithm to rank all college football teams and predict which teams have the best chance to win the 2025 CFP championship.