StReeTs

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STudent REsEarch TalkS

The Student Research Talks (StReeTs) at George Mason University is a student-run seminar, overseen by benevolent leader Prof. Sean Lawton. Its purpose is to give graduate and advanced undergraduate students a forum to discuss research and other topics of interest as well as the opportunity to practice giving talks to colleagues. All students are welcome to attend. If you would like to present a topic please contact one of the organizing committee members (Kelsi Listman and Nat Fink-Humes).

Time and location:

Fridays 2:30-3:20 pm, Exploratory Hall room 4106

Next Talk

5 December 2025 from 2:30-3:20, Lighting Talk Competition! Call for Abstracts.

Current Year

Fall 2025

Upcoming Talks

5 December 2025 from 2:30-3:20, Lighting Talk Competition! Call for Abstracts.

Prior Talks

21 November 2025 from 2:30-3:20, A Primer on Liquid Vector Spaces Ethan Clelland

14 November 2025 from 2:30-3:20, Extensions of Rockafellian Relaxation for PDE constraint optimization with distributional ambiguity, Morgan Shuman

31 October 2025 from 2:30-3:20, Modeling and optimization applied to cryopreservation, Jessica Masterson

24 October 2025 from 2:30-3:20, An Exploration into p-adics, Tim Banks

3 October 2025 from 2:30-3:20, To Connect a Vector Bundle, Brandon Barreto-Rosa

19 September 2025 from 2:30-3:20, IIP Presentations, Homological Voronoi Percolation and Learning the Geometries of Micrographs, Morgan Shuman and Shrunal Pothagoni respectively

12 September 2025 from 2:30-3:20, IIP Presentations, Dynamical Billiards on a Perturbed Elliptical Table and Duality in the Potts Gauge-Higgs Model, by Summer Chenoweth and Summer Eldridge respectively.

5 September 2025 from 2:30-3:20, Living in an Elastic Compact Bubble, Suzanna Castro-Tarabulsi

29 August 2025 from 2:30-3:20pm, Graduate Student Town Hall

Past Years

Spring 2025

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25 April 2025 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Trajectory Coding Via Grid Cells: An Axiomatic Approach, Anthony Vu (GMU)

18 April 2025 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, The Bloch Spaces on the Unit Disk and Standard Annulus, Sameer Savkar (GMU)

11 April 2025 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Operators With Symbol on a Class of Hardy Spaces, Hebah Alwaitiy (GMU)

4 April 2025 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, St. Petersburg's Queen of Mathematics: On the Life and Works of Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Umarkhon Rakhimov (GMU)

28 March 2025 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, An Integral Over Continuous Paths in S^1, Kelsi Listman (GMU)

21 February 2025 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, A Newtonian Derivation of Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion Summer Chenoweth (GMU)

31 January 2025 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Some Classical Characterizations of Convex Bodies as Ellipsoids Maddy Sherwood (GMU)

Fall 2024

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22 November 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Some people spend their entire lives thinking about the contraction mapping theorem: part 2 Sky Ratcliffe (GMU)

8 November 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Designing Electromagnetic Cloaking via Optimal Control Yaw Owusu-Agyemang (GMU)

1 November 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, A Fixed Point Method for Solving Quasivariational Inequalities Joe Franks (GMU)

18 October 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Use of Quantum Algorithms for Training Large Language Models Mark Dubynski (GMU)

11 October 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Multidimensional modelling of COVID antibodies, Kelsey Ellis (GMU)

4 October 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Topology of Shape and Data Jeanie Schreiber (GMU/Industrial Immersion Program)

27 September 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Kahler Differentials in \Gamma-algebras Quincy Frias (GMU)

20 September 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Modeling and optimization applied to cryopreservation, Jessica Masterson (GMU/Industrial Immersion Program)

13 September 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Paradoxical dice and general algorithms for physical models, Anthony Pizzimenti & Summer Eldgridge (GMU)

6 September 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Politics and 'puters: probabilistic algorithms for redistricting, Anthony Pizzimenti (GMU)

30 August 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, An Exploration of Minkowski Continued Fractions Brandon Barreto-Rosa (GMU)

Spring 2024

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10 May 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Eventually Stable Quadratic Polynomials over Q(i) Jermain McDermott (UMD)

3 May 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Learning Material Microstructures Using Hyperspherical Harmonics Shrunal Pothagoni (GMU)

26 April 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Modeling and Optimization Applied to Cryopreservation , Jessica Masterson (GMU)

12 April 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Entropy On Character Varieties , Violet Nguyen (GMU)

5 April 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Quadratic Irrationals and Continued Fractions , Tim Banks (GMU)

29 March 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, The Algebra and Geometry of F_1, Quincy Frias (GMU)

22 March 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, A Short Proof of The Harris-Kesten Theorem, Morgan Shuman (GMU)

15 March 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Schubert Calculus, Swan Klein (GMU)

23 February 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Utilizing non-negative least squares for data-driven discovery of dynamics, Tracey Oellerich (GMU)

16 February 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Application of Physics Informed Neural Networks for Predicting Disease Dynamics, Alonso Ogueda (GMU)

9 February 2024 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Formal Schemes, Groups, Quincy Frias (GMU)

Fall 2023

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8 December 2023 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Proximity, Boundaries, and Superrigidity, Harry Chen (GMU)

10 November 2023 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Half Spaces & Einstein's Universe, Pier-Olivier Rodrigue (GMU)

27 October 2023 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Spaces of Geometric Structures, Gabe Lumpkin (GMU)

29 September 2023 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds, Anunoy Chakraborty (GMU)

22 September 2023 from 2:30pm-3:20pm, Elliptic Variational Inequalities of the Second Kind, Joe Franks (GMU)

Spring 2023

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12 May 2023 (Exploratory Hall 4208) from 2:30pm-4:30pm:Automata and Lamplighter groups, Holly Miller (GMU)

28 April 2023 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm:Equivariant Neural Networks, Shrunal Pothagoni (GMU)

7 April 2023 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm:Speeds of Traveling Waves in an Inviscid FKPP-Burgers System, Matthew Kearney (GMU),

24 March 2023 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm:tt-Geometry and Chromatic Primes, Quincy Frias (GMU),

3 March 2023 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm:Geometry of Learning, Jeanie Schreiber (GMU),

24 February 2023 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm:h-cobordisms and the Whitney Trick, Quincy Frias (GMU),

Fall 2022

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18 November 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm:Morse Functions, the Morse-Floer Complex, and Floer Homology, Quincy Frias (GMU)

11 November 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: A Notion of Geometric Convolutions for Image Classification, Shrunal Pothagoni (GMU),

4 November 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: Data Assimilation for Quantum NV Diamond Spectroscopy, Shraddha Rajpal (GMU),

28 October 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: Determining the Betti numbers of R/(x^{p^e}, y^{p^e}, z^{p^e}) for most even degree hypersurfaces in odd characteristic, Heath Camphire (GMU)

21 October 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: Redistricting: Math, Politics, and People, Anthony Pizzimenti (GMU),

7 October 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: Graded Perinormality, Hannah Klawa (GMU),

23 September 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: Finite Element Approximation of a Membrane Model for Liquid Crystal Polymeric Networks, Lucas Bouck (UMD),

16 September 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: A Number-Theoretic Conjecture, Tyler Russ (GMU),

9 September 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: A Brief Introduction to Data-Driven Dynamical Systems, Tracey Oellerich (GMU),

2 September 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:30pm-3:20pm: (Super-)Commutative Algebra, Quincy Frias (GMU),

Spring 2022

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29 April 2022 (Hybrid) from 2:00pm-3:20pm: Stability of Waves in a Nonlocal Diffusion Model and Vertex Operator Algebras: Finite Dimensional Cases and Conformal Blocks, Zachary Richey (GMU) and George Andrews (GMU),

22 April 2022 (Hybrid) from 11:00am-12:00pm: The Persistence of Data: A Roadmap, Shrunal Pothagoni (George Mason University),

15 April 2022 (Hybrid): Modeling and Computation of Liquid Crystal Problems, Lucas Bouck (University of Maryland),

1 April 2022 (Virtual): An Introduction to the Erdo ̋s-Szekeres Problem in Two Dimensions, Tyler Russ (George Mason University),

25 March 2022 (Hybrid): Stratification and Arithmetic Dynamics on Character Varieties, Cigole Thomas (George Mason University),

11 March 2022 (Hybrid): Knitting 2-Manifolds, Savannah Crawford (University of Utah),

4 March 2022 (Virtual): Global Perinormality in Pullbacks, Hannah Klawa (GMU),

25 February 2022 (Virtual): Simplicial Sets in Topology and Category Theory, Quincy Frias (GMU),

4 February 2022: Industrial Immersion Program (IIP) Presentations Part II, Jessica Masterson (GMU) and Long Nguyen (GMU)

28 January 2022: Industrial Immersion Program (IIP) Presentations Part I, Tracey Oellerich (GMU) and Cigole Thomas (GMU)

Fall 2021

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3 December 2021 from 1:30-2:20 pm: Operator ranges and a Lie-group representation problem, Jesus Oliva-Maza (University of Zaragoza),

12 November 2021: Dynamics of the outer automorphism group action on finite field points of character varieties, Cigole Thomas (GMU),

5 November 2021: The Geometry of C^infinity Rings, Quincy Frias (GMU),

17 September 2021: Arithmetic Computation and Algorithms, Tyler Russ (GMU)

Spring 2021

No seminars were held this semester.

Fall 2020

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20 November 2020: Complementation, Switching and Local Complementation in Binary Matroids, Jagdeep Singh (Louisiana State University)

13 November 2020: Matrix Completion Problem - Algorithms and Analysis, Mahendra Panagoda (GMU),

30 October 2020: Bifurcation of Invariant Measures: An Introduction, Peter Rizzi (GMU)

9 October 2020: Introduction to Globally Perinormal Domains, Hannah Klawa (GMU)

2 October 2020: A Construction related to the Helly Number for line transversals to unit balls in the plane, Tyler Russ (GMU)

4 September 2020: The Orbifold Notation for Surface Groups, Savannah Crawford (GMU)

Spring 2020

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1 May 2020: MEGL Virtual Symposium (GMU) (Special Time 2:30- 5:30)

6 March 2020: Discussion of the Paper: Induced Subgraphs of Hypercubes and a Proof of the Sensitivity Conjecture by Hao Huang Liz Dinkelman (GMU)

21 February 2020: Mathematical Tools for Automated Detection of Antimicrobial Peptides Long Nguyen (GMU)

24 January 2020: Some Small Observations: Perfect Numbers, an Iterative Map Tyler Russ (GMU)

Fall 2019

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6 December 2019: MEGL Symposium

22 November 2019: Generalizing the Unscented Ensemble Transform to Higher Moments, Deanna Easley (GMU)

8 November 2019: A Visual Introduction to Buildings , Bram Bekker (Radboud University, Netherlands)

25 October 2019: Gram Determinants Motivated By Knot Theory, Rhea Palak Bakshi (George Washington University)

11 October 2019: External Optimal Control of Fractional Parabolic PDEs, Deepanshu Verma (GMU)

27 September 2019: Quantum Assisted Clustering for NISQ-era Devices, Guy Oldaker (Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, Virginia)

13 September 2019: Adaptability Conditions in Biological Networks, Tracey Oellerich (GMU)

Spring 2019

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3 May 2019: MEGL Fall 2018 Symposium, Special Time: 2:30-4:30pm

12 April 2019: AES: The Advanced Encryption Standard, Calvin Stanley (GMU)

29 March 2019: The Hodge Decomposition Theorem, Ryan Vaughn (GMU)

1 March 2019: An Introduction to Robust Perfect Adaptation Networks, Tracey Oellerich (GMU)

15 February 2019: Rotational Symmetries of Sequential Matrices,Yemeen Ayub(GMU)

1 February 2019: An Enumeration Problem Arising from Van der Waerden Hypergraphs, Julian Benali (GMU)

Fall 2018

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7 December 2018: MEGL Fall 2018 Symposium, Special Time: 2:30-6pm

9 November 2018: The Thickened T-Shirt and its Kauffman Bracket Skein Algebra, Rhea Palak Bakshi (GWU)

19 October 2018: Introduction to Operator Theory and Weighted Composition Operators, Shams Alyusof (GMU)

5 October 2018: Understanding the Behavior of Quasiperiodic Orbits , Arsah Rahman (GMU)

21 September 2018: Increasing outreach activities in the Illinois Geometry Lab , Claire Merriman (UIUC)

7 September 2018: Kernel Methods in Dimensionality Reduction, Ryan Vaughn (GMU)

Spring 2018

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4 May 2018: MEGL Spring 2018 Symposium

20 April 2018: How Reliable Are Our Computations?, Sayomi Stallings (GMU)

13 April 2018: An Introduction to Character Varieties, Cigole Thomas (GMU)

23 March 2018: Introduction to Polytopes, Alathea Jensen (GMU)

9 March 2018: Deep Learning for RF Device Fingerprinting in Cognitive Communication Networks, Shauna Revay (GMU)

2 February 2018: Root Finding with Chebyshev Polynomials: Background and Applications in 2-D, Lucas Bouck (GMU)

Fall 2017

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8 December 2017: MEGL Symposium, L106 Exploratory Hall, 2:30 pm to 5:10 pm

1 December 2017: Polygon Spaces, Jack Love (GMU)

10 November 2017: Genetic Mutations and Conjunctive Bayesian Networks, Thomas Ales (GMU)

3 November 2017: Algebraic Structures in Knot Theory, Sujoy Mukherjee (GWU)

27 October 2017: Coloring Squares of Planar Graphs with no 4-cycles and no 5-cycles, Bobby Jaeger (GMU)

29 September 2017: Tropical Geometry and Well-Poised Varieties, Shams Alyusof (GMU).

1 September 2017: Longest Orbits over Varieties of a Generalized Markoff Equation over Finite Fields, Marvin Castellon and Seth Lee (GMU).

Spring 2017

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12 May 2017: MEGL Symposium, 2:30-5:30pm

28 April 2017: Special Words in Free Groups, Tim Reid (GMU)

21 April 2017: Generalized Depth and Associated Primes in the Perfect Closure R-infinity, George Whelan (GMU)

24 February 2017: Counting Subwords of Elements of S_n, Brent Gorbutt (GMU)

Fall 2016

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16 December 2016: MEGL Symposium, 2:30-5:30pm

18 November 2016: Decomposition of Complex Hyperbolic Isometries by Involutions, Cigole Thomas (GMU)

11 November 2016: Asymptotic Dimension with Linear Control, Corry Bedwell (UMCP) (slides)

7 October 2016: Preliminaries for an Algorithm to Calculate Steiner Graphs in R^2, Tyler Russ (GMU)

23 September 2016: What is Persistent Homology?, Ryan Vaughn (GMU)

9 September 2016: Orbits, Special Words, and Polytopes, Orton Babb (GMU), Patrick Bishop (GMU), Joseph Frias (GMU), Mary Leskovec (GMU), Tim Reid (GMU), and Cigole Thomas (GMU)

2 September 2016: Polygons in Space, Jack Love (GMU)

Spring 2016

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6 May 2016: MEGL Symposium, in the Mason Experimental Geometry Lab from 1:00-5:00

22 April 2016: Surviving the Singularity: Using Grobner Bases to Describe Killer Robots, David Rice (GMU)

8 April 2016: The Hirsch Conjecture and the Diameters of Polytope Graphs, Mac Gallagher (GMU)

1 April 2016: Riesz Bases and Sampling Theory, Shauna Simeone (GMU)

26 February 2016: Permutation Groups and Puzzle Tile Configurations of Instant Insanity II, Amanda Justus (GMU)

12 February 2016: Binomial Coefficients in Congruence Equations, Tyler Russ (GMU)

29 January 2016: Diagonal Lengths of n-gons, Jack Love (GMU)

Fall 2015

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11 December 2015: MEGL Symposium (12:30 - 3:30 in MEGL)

20 November 2015: The Perfect Closure R^Infinity, George Whelan (GMU)

23 October 2015: Grobner Bases of Toric Ideals, Jack Love (GMU)

16 October 2015: Sums of Discrete Functions, Tyler Russ (GMU)

2 October 2015: Lower Bound Cluster Algebras and Stanley-Reisner Complexes, Bradley Zykoski (University of Virginia)

18 September 2015: Flag Varieties, Brent Gorbutt (GMU)

Summer 2015

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13-14 August 2015: MEGL Symposium, in 4106 EXPL from 11:00-3:00pm on both days.

Spring 2015

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1 May 2015: Probability Theory: A Crash Course, Diego Torrejon (GMU)

17 April 2015: Model reduction techniques for spatiotemporal data analysis in drought modeling, Marilyn Vazquez (GMU)

3 April 2015: The Geometry of Numbers, Alathea Jensen(GMU)

20 March 2015: Lattice Point Enumeration, Eli AlHajjar(GMU)

20 February 2015: Multiplication Operators on the Zygmund Space over a Tree, Rachel Locke (GMU)

6 February 2015: Matrix Algebras: Equivalent Ring Relations and Special Presentations, Sam Mendelson (GMU)

Fall 2014

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5 November 2014: Hom Polytopes , Jack Love (GMU)

21 November 2014: Graphs and Geometry , Brent Gorbutt(GMU)

5 December 2014: Introduction to Geometry of Finite Element Methods for Flow Problems James Cameron (GMU)