AMS Student Chapter Seminar
The AMS Student Chapter Seminar (aka Donut Seminar) is an informal, graduate student seminar on a wide range of mathematical topics. The goal of the seminar is to promote community building and give graduate students an opportunity to communicate fun, accessible math to their peers in a stress-free (but not sugar-free) environment. Pastries (usually donuts) will be provided.
- When: Thursdays 4:00-4:30pm
- Where: Van Vleck, 9th floor lounge (unless otherwise announced)
- Organizers: Ivan Aidun, Alex Bonat, Kaiyi Huang, Ethan Schondorf
Everyone is welcome to give a talk. To sign up, please contact one of the organizers with a title and abstract. Talks are 25 minutes long and should avoid assuming significant mathematical background beyond first-year graduate courses.
The schedule of talks from past semesters can be found here.
Fall 2025
| Date | Speaker | Title | Abstract |
| September 11 | Jacob Wood | Realizing Matroids | A matroid is a combinatorial object encoding notions of "independence". For example, given a set of vectors in a vector space, there is an associated matroid encoding which subsets of those vectors are linearly independent of one another. A matroid arising in this way is called "realizable", but it turns out some abstract matroids cannot be given in this way. In this talk, I'll introduce matroids and talk about how to find these unrealizable matroids. |
| September 18 | Sapir Ben-Shahar | More on Matroids | Essentially a continuation of Jacob's talk from last week, I'll give another perspective on matroids, including talking about other ways in which we can (sometimes) represent them. |
| September 25 | Taylor Tan | Dispersive Equations | As a model case I will focus on the free Schrodinger in R and the torus and compare the different dispersive behaviors (or lack thereof).
On the line, wave packet spread gives us the expected decay readily. On the tori, the story is more subtle due to constructive interference coming from the major arcs of a quadratic Weyl sum. This is meant for a general audience, so I will try to give the intuition with pictures. |
| October 2 | - | - | - |
| October 9 | - | - | - |
| October 16 | - | - | - |
| October 23 | - | - | - |
| October 30 | - | - | - |
| November 6 | - | - | - |
| November 13 | - | - | - |
| November 20 | Emma Hayes | An Introduction to My Favorite PDE | TBA |
| November 27 | THANKSGIVING | NONE | NONE |
| December 4 | - | - | - |