MSUM Mathematics majors Alicia Swenson, Kyle Benjamin, and Audrey Jensen to present in Undergraduate Math Seminar

Wednesday, April 19 | 4-4:50 p.m. | Bridges 268

Featuring MSUM Mathematics majors Alicia Swenson, Kyle Benjamin, and Audrey Jensen | Latin Squares; The Riffle Shuffle; Transcendental Number Theory 

Alicia Swenson will be speaking on “Latin Squares”
Latin squares are n x n matrices that are arranged in such a way that no row or column has the same element twice. As the size of the matrix increases, the possible number of Latin squares increases rapidly.

Kyle Benjamin will be speaking on “The Riffle Shuffle”
When you are playing any card game and it is your turn to deal, do you ever wonder about the mathematics that is happening when you shuffle a deck of cards? Through this seminar we will be discussing the riffle shuffle and the different amount of combinations that are possible from a deck of cards. From there we will discuss the two-different kinds of riffle shuffles from an in-shuffle and an out-shuffle. This will lead us to discuss the amount of perfect riffle shuffles it would take to get a deck back to its original ordering.

Audrey Jensen will be speaking on “Transcendental Number Theory”
We will discuss the history of transcendental number theory as well as a few theorems that help establish it. We will also discuss two open problems in transcendental number theory — the constant problem and Schanuel’s Conjecture.