Mathematics News

Archived News from 2017-18.

 

(1-25-18) The math department kicked off the new semester by hosting our first of five Beling lectures for this semester.  Professor Gi-Sang Cheon (pictured below) from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea gave the talk entitled New Applications of Riordan Arrays.  Gi-Sang is visiting IWU, with faculty host Prof. Tian-Xiao He. 

 

Prof. Gi-Sang Cheon, Sungkyunkwan University

(12-5-17)  Dr. Lee published a book (a monograph in an academic sense) co-authored with Jonathan Vlk '17 in winter 2017: Forecasting Stock Returns using a Copula-GARCH model. This book introduces an idea of modeling dynamic dependence of stock returns and stock forecasting methods by utilizing copula-based time series model.

(11-30-17) Today is our last Beling lecture of the semester, to be given by our very own Prof. Andrew Shallue.  The title of his talk is The Search for Pseudoprimes.

(11-1-17) We recently had two great talks.  One brown-bag lunch talk entitled "Finding Graph Decompositions with Computers" was delivered by Wenting Zhao '18.  Our third Beling lecture was delivered by Prof. Yanzhao Cao from Auburn University.  The title of Prof. Cao's talk was "Computational Optimal Design of Random Rough Surfaces in Thin-Film Solar Cells."

(10-16-17) Homecoming was this past weekend.  There was a math table at the annual pancake and sausage breakfast, and Prof. He had the pleasure of joining Faizal Chaudhury '96 and Ryan Williamson '98 for dinner (see the picture below).  It was great to see many of our alums back and to hear the amazing experiences that they've been having.

(9-28-17) Today we had a great Beling lecture given by Dr. Ivan Contreras, J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The title was "Graph theory in quantum mechanics and thermodynamics." 

(8-30-17) Welcome back everyone.  We kicked off the 2017-18 year by hosting our first Beling lecture in mathematics yesterday.  Dr. I-Chiau Huang (shown below), Professor and Research Fellow at The Institute of Mathematics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, gave a talk entitled "Methods of Generating Differentials."  Dr. Huang's faculty host was Prof. Tian-Xiao He.

(5-7-17) Congratulations to our graduates.  Our math grads are off to do great things in grad school, industry, insurance, business, teaching, and many other fields.

Some 2017 grads, from left: Yolanda Juarez, Cindy Basilio, Ruiqing Sun, Yaling Liu, Rui Jiang, Jacob Nowakowski, William O'Conner.

(4-13-17)  Jonathan Vlk '17 (pictured below) gave a student Beling lecture entitled "Modeling Conditional Dependence of Stock Returns Using a Copula-based GARCH Model."

Jonathan Vlk presenting his research at IWU.

(3-30-17) One of our excellent colleagues from Illinois State University, Prof. Olcay Akman, gave a brown-bag lunch today entitled "You Say Soccer and I Say Football; Let's Not Call the Whole Thing Off."

(3-24-17)  Rui Jiang '17 gave a student Beling lecture entitled "Bivariate Splines over Irregular Triangulations."

(3-21-17) Today we had a brown-bag lunch presented by Abby Reel '04 of IWU's Hart Career Center.  The title of her talk was "Math-to infinity and beyond: What IWU Math alums are doing and the career resources that helped them head that way!"

(2-23-17)  Toan Le '17 gave a brown-bag lunch talk entitled "A New Way of Proving NxN is Countable."

(2-21-17)  William O'Conner '17 gave a student Beling lecture entitled "Counting Multigraph Pairs of Orders 3 and 4."

(2-14-17) The department will be hosting the second Beling research talk of the semester this Thursday.  Our speaker is Prof. Trevor McGuire, from IWU.  The title of his talk is "A High Dimensional Version of Frobenius Numbers."

(1-19-17)  Prof. Lori Alvin from Bradley University gave our first Beling research talk of the semester today.  The title of her talk was "Dynamical Systems and Your Car Odometer." 

(1-8-17) Our professors and students have been busy doing research.  Here are a few of their recent accomplishments.   

Prof. Tian-Xiao He recently published the following papers.  Note that the first two were co-authored by IWU students.

• "Duals of the Bernoulli numbers and polynomials and the Euler numbers and polynomials.'' (With Jinze Zheng'17), Integers, 17 (2017), A1, 1--26.
• "A unified approach to construct a class of Daubechies orthogonal scaling functions.'' (With Tung Nguyen'15), J. Mathematical Research with Appl., 37 (2017), 29--39. 
• "Shift operators defined in the Riordan group and their applications.'' Linear Algebra and Its Appl.,  496 (2016),  331--350.
• "Applications of Riordan matrix functions to Bernoulli and Euler polynomials.'' Linear Algebra and Its Appl.,  507 (2016),  208-228. 
• "Row sums and alternating sums of Riordan arrays.'' (With Louis W. Shapiro), Linear Algebra and Its Appl.,  507 (2016),  77--95.
• "Application of Fa\'a Di Bruno's formula in the construction of combinatorial identities.'' (With  Jeff H.-C. Liao and Peter J.-S. Shiue), J. Combinatorics and Number Theory, 7 (2016), No. 3, 213--230.
• "Application of Polynomial Interpolation in the Chinese Remainder Problem.'' (With Scott Macdonald and Peter J.-S. Shiue) J.  Mathematical Research with Appl., 37 (2017),  90--96. 

Prof. Seung-Hwan Lee co-authored the following two papers, one of which was written with an IWU student. 

• (with Jonathan Vlk '17) "Modeling Conditional Dependence of Stock Returns using a Copula-based GARCH model," International Journal of Statistics and Probability, to appear.
• (with Prof. J. Shim, UC Denver) "Dependency between risks and the insurer's economic capital: A copula-based fmodel," Asia-Pacific Journal of Risk and Insurance, to appear.

(1-6-17) Happy New Year!  Over the winter break Prof. Andrew Shallue was awarded the 2016 Dick Lehmer award for best talk at the West Coast Number Theory Conference.  The title of his talk was "Average liar counts for degree 2 Frobenius pseudoprimes," and this is joint work with Andrew Fiori at the University of Calgary.