FIRST CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR UNDERGRADUATE PAPERS AND POSTERS

SUMS Conference
Saturday October 23, 2010
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia (about two hours west of D.C.)

The sixth annual Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics (SUMS) Conference at James Madison University is a one-day undergraduate research conference that will feature:

 * undergraduate contributed talks on mathematical research
 * undergraduate and high school poster sessions on research and expository topics
 * panel sessions on REU programs, graduate school, and industry
 * a special AMC workshop for high school students and faculty
* invited opening and closing addresses from dynamic, engaging mathematicians

Since its inception in 2004, the SUMS conference has grown to include over 200 participants annually. Most of these are college and university students and faculty; there is also a high school contingent.

Registration and lunch are free. Â Limited travel funds are available on a rolling application basis. Â The deadline for registration with lunch and abstract submission is October 8. We have two very exciting invited talks this year:

OPENING ADDRESS
Ravi Ramakrishna, Cornell University
Elliptic curves: What are they and why should we care?

Elliptic curves can be thought of from many points of view. Geometrically, they look like the surfaces of donuts, which are relatively straightforward objects. Arithmetically, they are extremely complex. Both the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem in the '90s and the Conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (one of the Clay Math Institute's million dollar problems) involve elliptic curves. In this talk I will explain what it means "to look at a donut arithmetically", why other sorts of surfaces are better understood and explain relations to classical Diophantine questions going back to ... Diophantus.

CLOSING ADDRESS
Cliff Stoll, Acme Klein Bottle Company
Low Dimensional Topology for Fun and Profit - or how to extract money from the 4th dimension...

For over ten years, Acme Klein Bottle has provided nonorientable manifolds to math folk. Like much of mathematics, it's marginally profitable, but endlessly entertaining. While thousands of computer models of the Klein Bottle grace the Internet, physical models are rarely built. Using Pyrex glass and a torch, we supply the finite but unbounded demand for one-sided, R3 immersed, zero-volume, borosilicate Riemannian manifolds. So how do you make a Klein Bottle? Come to Cliff's talk and find out!

For more information, to register, to apply for travel funds, submit a paper or poster, or print a conference poster, please visit www.math.jmu.edu/SUMS.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth Brown (brownet@math.jmu.edu)
Laura Taalman (taal@math.jmu.edu)
SUMS Directors