Clavius Activities at Holy Cross Summer of 2016

Clavius group at Holy Cross in 2016

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 2016

Martin Magid, Wellesley College
Oscar Palmas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Harvey Egan SJ, Boston College
Tomeu Estelrich Barcelo, Boston College

Clavius Community Notes

2016 Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts
Meeting #54: 19 June to 9 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-fourth 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, one nun, eight married couples, one without spouse and four single lay persons. Seventeen Clavius mathematicians participated in the lectures and seminars along with several faculty members from Holy Cross and other colleges and universities.

Community Activities 2016

June 29, 30, Clavius Symposium on Mathematics and Mysticism (details below)
June 22, talk by Andrew Hwang (Holy Cross), A Mathematician’s Perspective on Scientific Knowledge, was attended by several members of the Clavius group. This was part of the College’s Science Summer Research Lunch Seminar series.
July 4, Mass, social hour and dinner at the Cecils’ home.
June 22, July 5, Business meetings.

Seminars 2016

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

June 21, 22, 23, 24, Thomas Cecil, Lie sphere geometry and Dupin hypersurfaces
July 5, Oscar Palmas, Rigidity of hypersurfaces with constant higher order mean curvature in space forms
July 5, 6, 7, Patrick Ryan, Ruled real hypersurfaces in CP² and CH²
July 6, Martin Magid, The Bjorling problem for timelike minimal surfaces in R⁴₁

Topology Seminar

June 23, Paul Schweitzer, Exotic open 4-manifolds which are non-leaves
June 24, Pawel Walczak, News from extrinsic geometry of foliations
June 27, 29, 30, July 5, David Damiano (Holy Cross) An introduction to persistent homology and its applications
July 1, Larry Conlon, Cones of foliations almost without holonomy

Topics Seminar

June 21,22, John Little (Holy Cross), Conceptual Anachronism in the History of Mathematics: A case study from the interpretation of the conics of Apollonius
June 22, 27, 28, Carlos Vasco, A model-theoretic view of the conics of Apollonius
June 23, 24, Patrick Ryan, Indeterminate strings, prefix arrays and undirected graphs
June 27, Ellen Ryan (McMaster), Aging with spirit through contemplative photography
June 28, Thomas Banchoff, Archiving mathematics–What’s the story?
July 1, Barbara Reynolds, The Arbelos, the Salinon … and the Parbolos
July 1, Pete Suarez, Philosophy meets mathematics
July 5, Thomas Banchoff and Barbara Reynolds, Laguerre taxicab geometry
July 6, Nelson Velandia, Equations for spinning test particles in arbitrary orbits when they are orbiting in a weak rotating field
July 7, Cristina Ballantine (Holy Cross), A brief introduction to integer partitions

Clavius Symposium on Mathematics and Mysticism

June 29, Harvey Egan SJ (Boston College), Ignatius Loyola, the mystic
June 29, Tomeu Estelrich Barcelo (Boston College), “Christ came to take possession of me”: Mysticism, Simone Weil and the Christian tradition
June 30, Paul Schweitzer SJ, The mystical dimension of beauty in Mathematics
June 30, Javier Leach SJ, Critical Platonism, Mathematical mysticism