Clavius Activities at Holy Cross Summer of 2015

Clavius group at Holy Cross in 2015

List of Clavius mathematicians

Jennifer Ackerman
Michael Ackerman
Tom Banchoff
Adam Bartoszek
Jacob Binoy SJ
John Blanton
Tom Cecil
Lawrence Conlon
Pedro Ferreira SJ
Margaret Freije
Richard Freije
Kathy Hall
James Heitsch
Michele Intermont
Ron Knill
Javier Leach SJ

Jack Lutts
Maura Mast
Michael May SJ
Sr Barbara Reynolds SDS
Patrick Ryan
Paul Schweitzer SJ
Dennis Snow
Joanne Snow
James Stasheff
Pedro Suarez SJ
Andrius Tamulis
Carlos Vasco
Nelson Velandia SJ
Julio Vidaurrazaga
Pawel Walczak

Invited Colleagues 2015

Gideon Bahir-Maschler, Clark University
Martin Magid, Wellesley College
Thomas Murphy, California State University, Fullerton
Palle Yourgrau, Brandeis University

Clavius Community Notes

2015 Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts
Meeting #53: 28 June to 18 July

At the invitation of the College of the Holy Cross and its Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, the Clavius group gathered at Holy Cross for its fifty-third session. We were provided with office space and a lecture room in Swords Hall for our seminars and talks. Also, access to photocopying, printing services, email and the web was provided. The group’s housing arrangements and other needs were generously attended to by Chip O’Connor and Elizabeth Rice of the Events and Conference Services Department at Holy Cross. Members were housed in the Figge apartment complex, an excellent arrangement that made it possible for us to continue our vibrant community life. The participants this summer consisted of four Jesuits, seven married couples and four single lay persons. Thirteen Clavius mathematicians participated in the lectures and seminars along with several faculty members from Holy Cross and other colleges and universities.

Community Activities 2015

July 6, Faith discussion.
July 8, Memorial Mass for Clavius members who died in the past year — Andy Whitman, Jackie Conlon and David Knill. The Mass was followed by our annual Ignatius Day celebration.
July 9, Business meeting.
July 13, Community penitential service.
July 14, Talk on Pope Francis and other recent popes by Thomas Worcester SJ of the history department at Holy Cross.
July 15, Mass, social hour and dinner at the Cecils’ home.

Seminars 2015

Working Seminar in Differential Geometry

Meetings were held at 9:30 AM on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
Text Used: S. Sternberg: Curvature in Mathematics and Physics, Dover, 2012
Participants: Julio Vidaurrázaga, John Lutts, John Blanton, Carlos Vasco, Ron Knill and Nelson Velandia.
The work was an ongoing endeavor to understand the material. Most of the lecturing was done by Julio Vidaurrázaga and Carlos Vasco.

Differential Geometry Seminar

July 1, 2, Thomas Cecil, Clifford algebras and isoparametric hypersurfaces
July 2, Thomas Banchoff, A straight shot at the extrinsic Gauss-Bonnet theorem
July 6, 7, Tommy Murphy, Curvature-adapted foliations of symmetric spaces
July 8, Andy Hwang (Holy Cross), Paper surface geometry
July 9, Tommy Murphy, Complex Riemannian foliations of Hermitian symmetric spaces
July 13, 15 16, Patrick Ryan, Kimura’s theorem — The classification of Hopf hypersurfaces with constant principal curvatures in complex projective space
July 14, Martin Magid, Minimal surfaces in the product of two-dimensional real space forms endowed with a neutral metric
July 16, Gideon Bahir-Maschler, Distinguished metrics in conformal classes

Topology and Foliations Seminar

July 1, 8, Paul Schweitzer, Classical invariants of Legendrian knots on the 3-torus
July 6, Larry Conlon, What is a lamination and why should I care?
July 14, Paul Schweitzer, Can exotic 4-manifolds be leaves of foliations?
July 16, Larry Conlon, An overview of the Handel-Miller theory of endperiodic maps

Topics Seminar

July 7, Carlos Vasco, Chrono*topy before and after arithmetic, geometry and analysis, Back to Pascal, Kant and Brouwer?
July 7, Palle Yourgrau, On time and intuitionism: Some questions for Brouwer
July 9, Jacob Binoy, Randomness vs. fuzziness
July 9, Nelson Velandia, Equations of motion of a spinning test particle in a Kerr spacetime — numerical solution
July 10, Michele Intermont, Continuing to think about continuity
July 13, Carlos Vasco, A chrono*topic reframing of arithmetic beyond Peano, Dedekind and Russell towards Pythagoras, Kant and Brouwer.
July 13, Ellen Ryan, Aging with spirit through poetry
July 14, Carlos Vasco, A model-theoretic approach to Chrono*topy beyond Cantorian points and sets towards arrows and chains
July 15, Javier Leach, Public and personal causation of believing processes