Poughkeepsie Chapter of the Association For Computing Machinery

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Topic

Experimental Math on Wisteria Tables

Speaker

Bill Collier

When

Monday,       7:30 PM

Where

Marist College, Hancock Center (Building 14 on map), Room 2023. Park just north of Hancock Center, or in parking lot on south-east corner of Route 9 and Fulton Street. We thank Marist College for hosting the chapter's meetings.

More Information

This program is free and open to the public. Attendees should RSVP at Meetup.com.

All are welcome to join us beforehand for dinner at the Palace Diner at 6:00 PM.

For further information, go to Pok.ACM.org (QR code below):

QR code RSVP to ACM Poughkeepsie at   Meetup.com

About the Topic

“Experimental mathematics is an approach to mathematics in which computation is used to investigate mathematical objects and identify properties and patterns.” Eric W. Weisstein, quoted in Wikipedia.

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) contains over 300,000 integer sequences.  To browse it is to rekindle a childhood wonder at how fascinating mathematics can be. A math problem provided by Marist College Prof. Joe Kirtland a year ago led me to arrange 30 of the known OEIS sequences into a table, which was published at OEIS.org/A299741. I found four very different algorithms which generate the table.  I called the table a wisteria table because of the many interconnections it exhibits, reminiscent of the wisteria plant. Further rummaging through OEIS helped to identify other tables and more algorithms.

This work is exploratory and unfinished. No neat theorems explain the how and why of the observed behaviors.  There is magic and mystery here.  Many unanswered questions suggest avenues for further work.

About the Speaker

Bill Collier was a programmer at IBM and an entrepreneur at Multiprocessor Diagnostics.  He is the author of Reasoning About Parallel Architectures (Prentice-Hall, 1992).  He has an AB in math from Harvard and masters degrees from Syracuse University in both math and computer science.  He has been a member of the Poughkeepsie Chapter of the ACM since its founding in 1961.

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