Events

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.

A following Mathematical Colloquium will take place on Monday, November 9, at 4 pm in YR 321. The speaker will be Dr. Hannah Hoganson, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland at College Park. She will speak about A tale of three geometries: Points, Hamming cubes, and one-ended trees.

Abstact. Many groups arise naturally as the symmetry group of a geometric or topological object. In this talk we will focus on infinite but 0-dimensional topological spaces, specifically those that arise as end spaces. Their homeomorphism groups can be though of as infinite analogs of symmetric groups. We will start with an overview of some basic ideas in geometric group theory, before focusing in on the homeomorphism groups of countable end spaces. These are large topological groups, which are not finitely generated, so classical tools and techniques don't apply. Instead, we turn to descriptive set theoretic techniques of Rosendal to study their large-scale geometry and present a trichotomy classification theorem. This talk includes joint work with George Domat and Robbie Lyman.

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 20, 2026: Number Theory & Combinatorics Seminar.
  Dr. Kassie Archer, US Naval Academy, will give a talk on Iterating the fundamental bijection. 
  Abstract. Permutations can be viewed in two ways: algebraically as a function that can be written as a disjoint product of cycles, or combinatorially as an arrangement (or list) of numbers. Generally, bridging these two perspectives proves to be difficult. One tool that is sometimes used is Foata’s fundamental bijection, in which you write the permutation in cycle form, erase the parentheses, and read it in one-line form instead. In this talk, we will discuss what happens when we apply this bijection repeatedly, and in particular what happens when we restrict our focus to permutations that avoid certain patterns. Several open questions still remain regarding how permutations behave and we will also discuss many of these avenues of research.
    
• October 13, 2026: Number Theory & Combinatorics Seminar.
  Dr. Manami Roy, Lafayette College, gave 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.