Spring Seminars
DRP is organizing Spring Seminars to take place during Spring quarter 2026. Nine graduate students in our math department have created 8 informal seminars to run weekly during the spring quarter. "Informal" here is indicating that these seminars will not count towards units or have any grade associated to them, and also hints that the group sizes will be small, about 8-12 students per seminar.
The goal of these seminars is to create a welcoming space for studying fun and exciting math with a small group under the guidance of a mentor. Participants will also gain experience communicating math and collaborating with their peers. Many of the seminars are well designed for calculus students, and will be nice demonstrations that not all mathematical thinking is computing derivatives and integrals. If you are interested in exploring some new mathematics by working with a small group and collaborating with a mentor, check out the descriptions below and consider applying.
Applications are now open through Monday, March 30th (the start of Spring quarter). 2026 Spring Seminar Application form for Undergraduates
Here are this year's spring seminar offerings. Seminars will typically meet once a week for 60-90 minutes. Exact times will be determined, but each seminar has listed a range of possible times.
- Writing Proofs in Lean
led by Timothy Paczynski Syllabus
Meeting time:
- Curves for the Mathematically Curious
led by Isaiah Williams Syllabus
Potential meeting times: Tuesday or Thursday afternoons or evenings
Any curve that has a name has a story. In this seminar, we will explore nine
remarkable curves - their shapes, equations, and surprising properties - alongside the historical
moments and personalities that brought them to life. Students will explore both the mathematical
structure of these curves, from curvature to topological dimension, and the ideas they helped
shape, from classical geometry problems to modern cryptography. Prerequisites: Calculus I and II. Beyond that, curiosity, since it will help you choose a curve to present on!
- Emergent Complexity and Mathematical Art led by Tait Weicht Syllabus
Potential Meeting times: Tuesdays or Thursdays
This seminar center around the idea of "emergent complexity", where
surprisingly complex behavior arises from simple rules. Students will be introduced to the ideas
behind fractals, cellular automata, and dynamical systems. We students write programs to
reproduce the Serpinski triangle, Menger carpet and other classic fractals, run the logistic map
and display its behavior in 3 different ways, interact with Langton's ant and Conway's Game of
Life, simulate the way fireflies synchronize glowing via the Kuramoto model and simulate bird
flocking together. Work will emphasize students' creativity with options for how to modify
existing models to produce novel behaviors. We will use the Processing programming
environment to quickly begin writing programs to draw shapes to the screen and display
dynamical simulations. No prerequisites.
- An Applied Mathematician's Toolbox: Modeling, Data Science, and Applications led by Jennifer Paige and Kelli Gutierrez Syllabus
Potential Meeting times: Wednesday (likely morning) or Thursday (likely afternoon) for 1 hour
This seminar will be an exploratory introduction to mathematical modeling, covering different types of
models, data incorporation into those models, and machine learning basics. Each topic will be paired with
examples and applications from across disciplines to highlight their different strengths. Our goal is to give
a broad perspective of the approaches available to applied mathematicians as they encounter modeling
problems in the world. If you want to learn what mathematical models are, how to use them, and how to fit
them to data, this is for you!
Prerequisites: Calculus sequence (21a-d), Linear algebra (22a), Differential equations (22b), some coding experience in Python preferred but not necessary.
- Exploring Mathematics through Origami led by Evuilynn Nguyen Syllabus
Potential Meeting times: Monday or Tuesday sometime between 3-6pm for 1.5 hours
This seminar will explore mathematical concepts using the Japanese art of paper folding,
origami. We will demonstrate how paper folding can be used to visualize and solve geometric and algebraic
problems. Students will learn fundamental origami techniques, explore mathematical concepts, and discover
real world applications of origami in science and engineering. Each week combines theory with hands-on
activities, culminating in a final show and tell where students show off an origami model that interested
them mathematically. Prerequisites: Excitement to learn.
- Gaming with system to game the system! led by Jake Quinn Syllabus
Potential meeting times:
As a kid, I often played games like Chopsticks or Tic-Tac-Toe. As I played them more, I started to discover ways
to force draws. At the time, it was exciting to gradually come up with solutions to the games. In this seminar, we
will try to revel in ways to unwind more complicated games. In these logic-based, two-player games, a famous game
theoretic result (Zermelo's Theorem) tells us that if the game cannot end in a draw, a player has a winning strategy.
We will explore the consequences of this theorem (when it applies) by playing and strategizing in several two-player
games over the quarter. Prerequisites: None.
- Curiosities of Counting led by Mary Claire Simone Syllabus
Potential meeting times: Tuesday or Thursday for 1 hour
This seminar will be an exploratory introduction to combinatorics, the branch of math that studies fancy counting. We will learn and practice using essential counting techniques and strategies, and then apply them to problems involving discrete graphs (collections of dots and edges) and the symmetries of triangles, squares, cubes, and more. The end of the seminar will include some arts and crafts and appreciation of M.C. Escher's artwork. Prerequisites: None.
