Speaker: Dr. Natalie Behague
Title: Un, Dos, Tres: How to Count
Abstract: You probably think you already know how to count. Well think again! In this hands-on session, you will be presented with some mathematical objects that are difficult to enumerate, and you will work in small groups to apply three different approaches to counting them: namely, being systematic, finding correspondences, and recursion — building bigger cases up from smaller cases. We will discuss the strengths and limitations of each approach, and with any luck there will be some insights and surprises along the way.
Bio: Natalie Behague is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Victoria. She works in various topics under the broad umbrella that is combinatorics, investigating objects including graphs (in the sense of a collection of nodes and edges between them), two-player games (think tic-tac-toe) and automata. Natalie is from the UK and was educated at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London. With terrible timing she moved to Canada in 2020, spending a year working from home for Toronto Metropolitan University before moving to Victoria in January 2022.
Speaker: Dr. Trefor Bazett
Title: The Bizarre Worlds of Non-Euclidean Geometry
Abstract: Straight lines, triangles, circles, these are the familiar types of objects we study in geometry. However in non-Euclidean geometry we imagine worlds where theses geometric objects behave in new and fascinating ways. For example, a ‘straight line’ drawn on a ball like the surface of the earth becomes a circle around the ball, and this is just the beginning of the weirdness! You should bring a compass for drawing circles to this session.
Bio: Trefor Bazett is a math professor at UVic who is passionate about sharing math ideas with his students. His favourite type of math is called Topology, which studies shapes like Geometry does, but here everything is all squishy and malleable as if it was made out of Play-Doh. Cool! He also loves making math videos for YouTube: https://youtube.com/drtreforbazett