Talk by Mark Embry, from October 13

I am actually enrolled in the careers in math lecture series but this was the first class period during which I felt that the presentation merited a blog post. Additionally, I found it very interesting. This lecture was one of the most interesting lectures I have attended. Particularly because I have had few exposures to applications of the mathematics covered in most of my classes. I thought the most interesting part was how graph theory and matrix theory are so connected. I am also in graph theory right now and we have talked about creating the adjacency matrices for the purpose of finding isomorphisms between graphs. It was enjoyable to see how the matrices serve so much greater purposes in analyzing data and graphs.

I think the most difficult part of the lecture to understand is when he was discussing ranking the football teams. He said something about a theorem called Perron Frobenius Theorem at which point he repeated to perform some same process to the data repeatedly in order to finally come to the eigenvector. My linear algebra is very rusty so perhaps this would make more sense if I had just taken the class or had more practice. There were, of course, several other places in the discussion that I did not understand because I have not studied enough linear algebra. But in all, I was pleasantly surprised that I could follow the majority of the discussion.