Edison Hauptman gives talk at Westminster College
In October, graduate student Edison Hauptman was given the opportunity to present a seminar at Westminster College. His talk was titled, “How to Solve a Minecraft Puzzle like a Mathematician.” We asked Edison to share how this talk came to be and his overall experience of the presentation. He stated the following,
“I was given an opportunity to give an undergrad-friendly talk after meeting Dr. Heather Muchowski, who is an Assistant Professor at Westminster College (and a fellow alum of Marist College ('15)). She saw me give a similarly styled talk (on the Stable Queer Marriage Problem) at the Spring 2023 Allegheny Mountain Section Conference and came up to me after the talk.
In the months prior to this talk, I had been independently studying a puzzle I had first seen in a Minecraft tournament. It can be solved using some invariant and mono-variant strategies, so I built my presentation around this critical and approachable problem-solving technique.
I drove to and from Westminster on the day of my presentation. Before the talk, Dr. Muchowski introduced me to Dr. Matteo Luisi, and they kindly gave me a tour of Westminster's math and physics departments—I saw their observatory and planetarium! Then I presented my talk during their Friday lunch seminar, which about 8 faculty and 40 students attended. After my talk, I stayed for another hour to watch Dr. Muchowski teach her Probability class.
The entire experience confirmed my interest in teaching at a small liberal arts college after I earned my PhD. I met many curious and friendly undergraduates, and I felt quite at home.
Meeting Dr. Muchowski was a lucky coincidence, but as they say, luck is where preparation meets opportunity. I have improved my presentation skills by giving undergraduate-friendly talks, where I must explain concepts with genuine clarity. I have looked out for (and taken) opportunities to give these talks at conferences. And as a bonus to thank the people who have helped me get to where I am, I get to talk about my connections and start to make new ones.
If there are graduate or undergraduate students who are thinking about giving more talks, I would be happy to share more advice or talk more about my experience!”
Graduate Student Seminar
This fall, two graduate students, Yizhou Zeng and Rudrendra Kashyap, of our Mathematics department started the “Graduate Student Seminar” to highlight research of our graduate students in the mathematics department. This seminar included a wide range of topics, in both pure and applied mathematics. For example, Yizhou Zeng gave a talk on the course Dehn function on metric space and extension problems to the Heisenberg group. In another talk, Matthew Cartier talked about the stratification of Grassmannian and how Schubert subvarieties of the Grassmannian arise from it. Similarly, Kanan Gupta talked about the accelerated gradient descent algorithm, which helps to achieve an accelerated convergence in the case of noisy gradients. Arshia Gharagozlou talked about the conjecture stated by Neumann and Reid, which states the only hyperbolic knots that admit a hidden symmetry are the figure-8 knot and the two dodecahedral knots and his attempts to test for counterexamples using orbifold covers. This seminar also hosted an informative talk followed by a Q&A session by the postdoctoral associates of the math department, where they discussed postdoctoral and academic trends, with a particular focus on the job market, both academic and Industrial. It was well appreciated and attended by more than 20 graduate students.