Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The standard map is a widely studied area-preserving system with application to many natural phenomena. When unperturbed, every orbit of this map lies on an invariant circle. In this talk we will explore what happens to these circles when the system is perturbed, employing both analytical and numerical tools. I will conclude by discussing some active areas of current research.

Have you heard the urban legend that an experienced college recruiter can make an initial decision on whether or not to read your resume in less than six seconds? Would you like to see if your current resume can survive the six-second glance?Would you like to improve your chances of surviving the initial cut? Do you know what happens to your resume once you hand it to the recruiter? How do you craft a resume that competes with 100,000 other resumes? Dr. Matthew Clark has supported college recruiting efforts for a variety of large corporations and is a master at sorting resumes in six seconds or under. Join us August 28th, 2013 in Skiles 005 at noon for a discussion of how most industry companies handle resumes, what types of follow up activities are worth-while, and, how to improve your chances of having your resume pass the "six second glance".

A 1986 article with this title, written by M. Zuker and published by the AMS, outlined several major challenges in the area. Stating the folding problem is simple; given an RNA sequence, predict the set of (canonical, nested) base pairs found in the native structure. Yet, despite significant advances over the past 25 years, it remains largely unsolved. A fundamental problem identified by Zuker was, and still is, the "ill-conditioning" of discrete optimization solution approaches. We revisit some of the questions this raises, and present recent advances in considering multiple (sub)optimal structures, in incorporating auxiliary experimental data into the optimization, and in understanding alternative models of RNA folding.

In the last few years many problems of mathematical and physical interest, which may not be Hamiltonian or even dynamical, were solved using techniques from integrable systems. I will review some of these techniques and their connections to some open research problems.