Elon's chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon, the national math honor society, and Elon's Statistics Club hosted statistician Dr. Sat Gupta (UNC-Greensboro) for a guest lecture on applied statistics on April 5, 2016.
To a crowd of 54 Elon students and faculty, Gupta delivered his talk titled, “Applied Statistics: Some Interesting Applications.” In it, he discussed statistical methods he has used to collect and analyze data. He also discussed one occasion where he testified in court on a case that dealt with alleged age discrimination.
The event was co-sponsored by Elon’s chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon (the national math honor society) and Elon’s Statistics Club. With the help of faculty advisor Laura Taylor, the Stats Club will soon become Elon’s chapter of Mu Sigma Rho, the national statistics honor society.
After Gupta’s talk, Pi Mu Epsilon faculty advisor Chad Awtrey announced the final colloquium speaker for spring 2016. Dr. Roland Minton, professor of mathematics at Roanoke College (VA), will give a talk on Wednesday, May 4, 3:30 pm in Duke 302. His title and abstract are below. This talk is free and open to all in the Elon community.
Title: The Curious Case of the Dog Who Could Do Calculus
Abstract:
Elvis, a Welsh Corgi, and his owner Tim Pennings became highly successful ambassadors for mathematics after the publication of the journal article “Do Dogs Know Calculus?” Elvis had a remarkable ability to solve a standard calculus related rates problem of fetching a ball thrown into water. Several variations on this problem have kept the editors of College Mathematics Journal busy, with one article “Do Dogs Know Bifurcations?” using Elvis to find new proofs of Snell’s Law and the arithmetic/geometric mean inequality. Many articles have raised interesting questions about how Elvis does it. In this talk, we meet Elvis and the problems he could solve, and introduce research investigating how animals of all types, including humans, learn mathematics.