Speaker Series
SUMO hosts regular talks given by professors, grad students, or visitors about undergraduate-accessible topics in pure and applied mathematics that go beyond the standard curriculum. The purpose of this series is to expose undergraduates to some topics not normally covered in the classroom, as well as to introduce them to Stanford's faculty and community. Talks are generally accessible to freshmen in the 50-series.
Interested in giving a talk? Email us at (stanfordugradmath at gmail.com)
Past Speaker events
2019-2020 | 2021-2022 | 2022-2023 | 2023-2024 | 2024-2025 | 2025-2026 |
2025–2026 Schedule
Fall 2025
| Date | Speaker | Title | Abstract | Media |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date | Speaker | Talk Title | Abstract | Media |
| October 10 | Rawley Harrison | Elliptic Curves, Moduli Spaces, and a Modular form | This title, designed to be (perhaps excessively) eye-catching, comprises three topics of great mathematical significance, each of which play key roles in important problems of modern mathematics. While understanding any one of them to a significant degree would take at least an entire course, let alone one lecture, in this talk, I will attempt to scratch the tip of these three icebergs at once! In this talk, I will give a (relatively) elementary introduction to the three topics in a remarkable place where they intersect: the moduli space of elliptic curves over C. I will first give a brief introduction to elliptic curves, some of their key properties, and then construct said moduli space. This talk is designed to be accessible to undergrads of all levels. | |
| October 17 | Rafe Mazzeo | Spectral Geometry and Other Inverse Problems | Many problems, both in the "real world" and in pure mathematics, ask whether one can obtain information about an object, e.g. its geometry or other structure, by sensing it with indirect measurements. Examples go all the way from practical applications like earthquake detection and medical imaging to problems such as whether one can hear the shape of a drum, or read off the full geometry of a shape from more primitive geometric data. There is now a coherent mathematical field that embraces many of these questions, and I will describe a few interesting settings. | Poster |
| November 21 | Zehan Hu | Knot Theory and the Jones Polynomial | Knots and links provide some of the most visual and intuitive objects in topology. They are everywhere: in shoelaces and on your Stanford math t-shirt. This talk introduces the Jones polynomial, an invariant that assigns to every knot a polynomial capturing subtle information. We will discuss how the Jones polynomials are computed and how they can tell knots and links apart from one another. No background in topology will be assumed. |
More to come soon!!
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