Clavius Activities at Holy Cross Summer of 2006

Clavius group at Holy Cross in 2006

List of Clavius mathematicians

Hugh Albright FSC
Tom Banchoff
Adam Bartoszek
John Blanton
Tom Cecil
Lawrence Conlon
Pedro Ferreira SJ
Margaret Freije
Richard Freije
James Heitsch
Michele Intermont
Ron Knill
Jack Lutts
Maura Mast
Michael May SJ

John Poluikis CSB
Sr Barbara Reynolds SDS
Patrick Ryan
Paul Schweitzer SJ
Dennis Snow
Joanne Snow
James Stasheff
William Stoeger SJ
Pedro Suarez SJ
Andrius Tamulis
Carlos Vasco
Julio Vidaurrazaga
Pawel Walczak
Andrew Whitman SJ

Invited Colleague 2006

Renee Laverdiere, College of the Holy Cross

Clavius Community Notes

2006 Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts
Meeting #44: 1 July to 29 July

At the invitation of the College of the Holy Cross and its Department of Mathematics, the Clavius group gathered at Holy Cross for its forty-fourth session. Through the stalwart efforts of Chip O’Connor and Elizabeth Rice of Conference Services, we were provided with two lecture rooms in Swords Hall for our seminars and talks and access to office space, photocopying, printing services, email and the web. We were housed in the rather new Senior Apartments and the arrangements proved ideal, with a large common area for community activities — daily Mass, social hours and shared meals. The participants this summer consisted of five Jesuits, one other priest, one sister, nine married couples, three other lay persons and three guests. Twenty Clavius mathematicians participated in the lectures and seminars along with several faculty members from Holy Cross and other colleges and universities.

Faith Discussions 2006

July 13, Featuring Scott Schaeffer-Duffy from the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester. Scott gave a spellbinding narrative of how for twenty years, he and his wife Claire have shared their home with needy strangers and have worked continually for peace and justice.
July 19, Discussion led by Paul Schweitzer, SJ, concerning the Common Educational Project of the Society of Jesus in Latin America. Among the issues discussed was the problem of making our education accessible to children of poor and middle-class families.

Seminars 2006

Special Topics Seminar

July 13, 14: Pedro Ferreira, Topics in control theory
July 14: Michele Intermont, On calculus and derivatives: the Goodwillie kind
July 17 (2 talks): David Damiano (Holy Cross), Kaufmann bound on the Thurston-Benneguin invariant in Legendrian knot theory
July 18: Paul Schweitzer, The asymptotic linking invariant I (theory of V. Arnold)
July 20: Paul Schweitzer, The asymptotic linking invariant II (the extension to higher dimensions — thesis of J. Chira)
July 21: Larry Conlon, Foliation cycles
July 21: Pedro Suarez, Clifford algebras and spinors
July 24: Frank Farris (Santa Clara University), The Gini index: A measure of equitability
July 24: Ellen Ryan (McMaster University), Finding a new voice through adversity
July 27: Edward Soares (Holy Cross), The mathematics of tomographic imaging
July 27: Cristina Ballantine (Holy Cross), Combinatorics and representation theory of p-adic groups

Mathematical Education Seminar

July 10: Thomas Banchoff, Michael May and Barbara Reynolds, Reports on workshops for mathematics and teaching
July 18: Barbara Reynolds, Mathematics in the Franciscan (or Jesuit) tradition — integrating faith and values into mathematics classes
July 24, Barbara Reynolds, Angle bisectors and reflections in polygons — an exploration with polygons using the Geometer’s Sketchpad

Geometry Seminar

July 6, 7: Andrew Whitman, Lie algebras
July 10: Thomas Banchoff, Maximum volume quadrilaterals and isoperimetric variations
July 13: Maura Mast, The density of closed geodesics in 2-step nilmanifolds
July 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18: Thomas Cecil, Lie sphere transformations
July 20, 21: Patrick Ryan, Pseudo-Einstein hypersurfaces in CP²
July 25: Martin Magid and Yang Song (Wellesley College), Discrete isothermic surfaces
July 25: Martha Dussan (Universidade de Sao Paulo), Isothermic surfaces in Lorentz space and their associated Grassmannian systems
July 25: Andrew Hwang (Holy Cross) Canonical metrics in complex geometry
July 27: Renee Laverdiere, The theorem of Cartan-Dieudonné

Working Seminar on the Relation between Physics and Mathematics

July 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14: John Lutts et al., Vector bundles
July 17, 18, 20, 21, 24: Julio Vidaurrazaga et al., Connections in vector bundles
July 25, 27: John Poluikis, Differentiable manifolds

Two Clavius Lecturers