Events

The Department of Mathematics sponsors a regular colloquium that hosts several talks by external speakers every year and a general faculty seminar for talks by faculty and students. Seminars are listed below the colloquia.

Mathematics Colloquium

The next Mathematics Colloquium will take place on Thursday, October 15, at 4 pm in YR 321. The speaker will be Dr. Youran Sun, a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Maryland at College Park. He will speak about Autonomous research: From prompt engineering to reinforcement learning.

Abstract. LLMs are making research production increasingly scalable. However, how to use LLMs to conduct research, how capable they are at research, and how to improve their research capabilities remain open questions. We first present Agon, a massively parallel, cross-disciplinary research pipeline, and discuss how it can reduce the time that human scientists spend on research. We then evaluate Agon on more narrowly scoped problems, including symbolic regression, alpha discovery, and PDE solving. Next, we discuss the limitations of LLM-based research, including which parts of the research process still require human involvement and how to construct benchmarks that expose the weaknesses of LLMs as research agents. Finally, I will discuss how to use RL to teach LLMs to conduct research. Together, these topics outline a path from prompting LLMs to perform research toward training them to become more capable research agents.

Recent Mathematics Colloquium Talks

Date Topic Speaker

Sept 21, 2026

 Global guarantees for multimodal sampling:  Analytical tools and the value of advice

Matheau Santana-Gijzen,
Johns Hopkins University

Apr 29, 2026

 Weyl, subconvex \( L^p \)-sets and arithmetic functions

 Prof. Trevor D. Wooley, 
Purdue University

Apr 22, 2026

 Understanding the spline geometry of deep neural networks

Dr. Imtiaz Humayun,
 Google Research

Mar 25, 2026

 Weak assumptions in algebra and logic

 Jacob Stern, 
CUNY Graduate Center

Feb 25, 2026

 Reducibility of convex cones

Dr. Michael Orlitzky,
Viabit, LLC
Nov 10, 2025 Connecting noticing of student thinking to responsive teaching in math and science

Dr. Tara Barnhart,
Chapman University
Oct 27, 2025 Introduction to statistical meta-analysis with an application

 Dr. Bimal Sinha, UMBC
Oct 21, 2025 Large zeros of linear recurrence sequences

Prof. Florian Luca,
Stellenbosch University
Apr 25, 2025 Defining connected components

Dr. Alfred Dolich,
Kingsborough CC (CUNY)
Apr 24, 2025 Middle-school students’ meanings of points from quantitative and covariational reasoning perspectives

Dr. Halil Tasova,
Cal State - San Bernardino
Mar 14, 2025 A multi-species, multi-stimuli rheological model for living polymers

 Dr. Michael Cromer,
RIT
Feb 13, 2025 Using data science to understand patterns of social harm

Prof. George Mohler,
Boston College

Seminar Meetings

The Mathematics Seminar is the venue where Towson faculty and students report on their research activities. 

In addition, several research groups have research seminars in their respective research areas:

  • ASRM Seminar (coordinated by Min Ji):
    Meets on Fridays at 10 am
  • Number Theory & Combinatorics Seminar (coordinated by A. Hardt, A. Kumchev and N. McNew):
    Meets on Tuesdays at 4:00 pm in YR 321.

Recent and Upcoming Seminars

  • October 13, 2026: Number Theory & Combinatorics Seminar.
    Dr. Manami Roy, Lafayette College, will give a talk on Local and global data of rational elliptic curves.
  • April 28, 2026: Number Theory & Logic Seminar.
    Dr. Margaret Thomas, Purdue University, gave a talk on Effective Pila-Wilkie bounds for Pfaffian sets with some Diophantine applications.
  • March 6, 2026: ASRM Speaker Series
    Matt Deveney '01', FSA, EA,     presented a lecture How an actuary plays the "Game of Life."
  • October 16, 2025: Number Theory Seminar.
    Dr. Spencer Hamblen, McDaniel College, gave at talk on Sums of k-th powers in ramified p-adic rings.
  • September 16, 2025: Number Theory Seminar.
    Dr. Vefa Goksel gave a talk on Square patterns in dynamical orbits.

Recent Mathematics Seminar & Sabbatical Talks

  • On Monday, September 14, 2026, Dr. Diana Cheng presented a sabbatical talk on Increasing Teachers’ Self-Efficacy with Using Artificial Intelligence for Culturally Responsive Mathematics Lesson Development.
  • On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, Dr. Kristin Frank presented a sabbatical talk on Rethinking the Role of Quantitative Reasoning in Students' Mathematical Thinking.
  • On Monday, April 13, 2026. Dr. Xiaoyin Wang presented a sabbatical lecture on Bayesian Analysis for Negative Binomial INGARCH Models with Minimal Prior Information. 
  • On Friday, March 13, 2026, Dr. Mostafa Aminzadeh presented a sabbatical talk on Extending Approximate Bayesian Computation to Nonlinear Regression Models: The Case of Composite Distribution. 
  • On Wednesday, March 4, 2026, Dr. Chris Cornwell presented a sabbatical lecture on the Functional Dimension of ReLU Neural Networks.