Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Sage is widely considered to be the defacto open-source alternative to Mathematica that is freely available for download to users on most standard platforms at sagemath.org. New users to Sage are also able to use its capabilities from any webbrowser and other useful Linux-only software by registering for a free account on the Sage Math Cloud platform (SMC). In addition to providing users with excellent documentation, Sage allows its users to develop spohisticated mathematics applications using Python and other excellent open-source developer tools that are well tested under both Unix / Linux and Windows environments. In this two-week workshop we provide a user-friendly introduction to Sage for beginners starting from first principles in Python, though some coding experience in other languages will of course be helpful to participants. The main project we will be focusing on over the course of the workshop is an extension of the open-source library provided by the Tilings Gap Distributions and Pair Correlation Project developed by the workshop guide at the University of Washington this and last year. This application will allow participants in the workshop to hone their coding skills in Sage by working on an extension of a real-world computational mathematics application in statistics and geometry. Prospective participants can gain a heads-up on the workshop by visiting the syllabus webpage freely available for modification online at https://github.com/maxieds/WXMLTilingsHOWTO/wiki. The workshop guide will also offer continued free technical support on Sage, Python programming, and Linux to participants in the workshop after the two-week session is complete. Future AMS workshop sessions focusing on other Sage programming topics may be run later based on feedback from this proto-session. Faculty and postdocs are welcome to attend. See you all there on Friday!

All of us have seen talks where the speaker uses slides. Some are great, and some are awful. Come and learn how to make great slide decks and how to avoid making awful ones. We will share a number of pieces of software that are easy to use and that can help you to improve your slide decks. We will also discuss best practices and dissect several short slide decks together. Next week there will be a follow-up, hands-on workshop on using the software Inkscape to create mathematical figures for talks, posters, and papers.

Many graduate students struggle to identify a thesis or dissertation topic. We'll talk about how to choose wisely. Using his own experiences as an example, JD will describe how graduate students and others interested in research can use what they know to identify promising topics and develop them into concrete proposals. JD has been in the Math Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech since 2012. Starting out with a general focus on mathematics, he used directed study courses and other university resources to identify his dissertation topic in less than a year. He was awarded a 2014 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for his dissertation research proposal.