November 2025 - Um-gms - University of Manitoba Mailing Lists

Fw: Colloquium this Wednesday - Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil (Regina)
by Homer De Vera 26 Nov '25

26 Nov '25

Dear GMS, The speaker at today's department colloquium is Dr. Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil, our invited speaker from the University of Regina. So let's please attend if we can. See the invitation below from Dr. Karen Gunderson for more details. After the talk at about 2:45pm, we will be holding a Q&A session about graduate study/research experience/general experience in academia with Dr. Lacaze-Masmonteil as our resource speaker. If you have some questions that you'd like us to ask for you, kindly submit them on this form<https://forms.gle/Wrecpwti36z2f2hD6>. Also at around 5pm, we will be going for bouldering at The Hive with our guest. It will cost about $35-40 individually. Don't hesitate to join if interested, just let me know so we can arrange the transportation plans to get there. Thanks! Best, Homer ________________________________ From: Karen Gunderson <Karen.Gunderson(a)umanitoba.ca> Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2025 9:31 AM To: Kerry Nemet <Kerry.Nemet(a)umanitoba.ca>; Melanie Vanderhorst <Melanie.Vanderhorst(a)umanitoba.ca> Subject: Colloquium this Wednesday - Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil (Regina) Dear colleagues, This week's in-person Colloquium talk will be: Wednesday, 26 November at 1:30pm and held in 225 St Paul’s College. Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil (Regina) will be speaking on “On the second largest eigenvalue of certain graphs in the perfect matching association scheme” (see abstract below). Dr. Lacaze-Mastoneil is the invited speaker of the Graduate Mathematics Society this term. Please make a special effort to attend the talks by our in-person speakers! Next week, our in-person speaker will be Dr Yevgeniy Bilokopytov (Alberta). As always, I am maintaining a public google calendar that you can subscribe to for up-to-date seminar information: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=840d5f2e955ab7313f26b18ff3b8… Best wishes, Karen, your colloquium coordinator This week’s talk details: Date and time: Wednesday November 26th, 1:30-3:00pm Location: 225 St Paul’s College Speaker: Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil (Regina) Title: On the second largest eigenvalue of certain graphs in the perfect matching association scheme Abstract: Defined as the difference between its two largest eigenvalues, the spectral gap of a graph plays an important role on our understanding of its connectivity as observed by Godsil and Royle (2001). Since computing the largest eigenvalue of a graph is generally not too difficult, the crux to understanding the spectral gap of a graph is to compute its second largest eigenvalue. In this talk, we will consider the spectral gap of certain graphs in the perfect matching association scheme. Since these graphs are part of the same association scheme, they have the same eigenspaces. These eigenspaces correspond to irreducible representations of the symmetric group and thus, one could use these irreducible representations to compute the eigenvalues of each graph. In practice, such computations are difficult to perform which makes it difficult to find the eigenspace that realizes the second largest eigenvalue. The focus of my talk will be to identify this eigenspace for selected graphs in the scheme. This is joint work with Himanshu Gupta, Allen Herman, Roghayeh (Mitra) Maleki, and Karen Meagher.

1 0

Graduate student-led department colloquium with invited speaker: Dr. Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil
by Homer De Vera 20 Nov '25

20 Nov '25

Hi All, Every term we are encouraged by the department to invite a speaker to come visit UManitoba and give a talk at the math department colloquium. We are tasked to organize the visit from their arrival to departure with assistance from the department staff and most expenses are covered by the department. Last year, we invited Dr. Harmony Zhan from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This term we have invited Dr. Alice Lacaze-Masmonteil, a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Regina, whose research interests include cycle decompositions of graphs and pursuit-evasion games on graphs. She will be arriving next week Monday (Nov 24) and depart on Thursday (Nov 27). She is scheduled to give a talk at the department colloquium on Wednesday (Nov 26). Throughout her stay, we will be assisting her, accompanying her in some lunches/dinners with grad students/postdocs and possibly faculty members, or taking her around Winnipeg like visiting the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. This would be a great opportunity to network with an early-level researcher in Canada especially if you are interested in the speaker's research area, or in general to gain insights from her experiences in academia. I am forming a committee to oversee these tasks. As part of the committee, you may put this on your CV as event organizer under "service to university" or "extracurricular activities." If you also have ideas for other speakers to invite next term, this would be a good experience so that you'll know how it goes for the next time with your preferred invited speaker. If you are just interested in joining the lunches/dinners but not as part of the committee, that's perfectly fine too. Please sign up on this form<https://forms.gle/Q3sCfGiaAWUniqjg8> to let me know about your interest and availability. Best, Homer

1 0

[GMS] Grad Seminar on November 19
by Berkant Cunnuk 19 Nov '25

19 Nov '25

Dear GMS, I hope you all had a productive reading week. If you didn't, don't worry: here is a picture to make your day better. [cid:80ccea49-2a00-4d5f-910d-306231dfbc63] You are welcome. We will have a seminar on 19th of November, Wednesday in 123 St. Paul's between 12:30 and 13:30. Our speaker is @Solomon Mensah<mailto:mensahs2@myumanitoba.ca>. The details about his talk are below. Title: A single patch and Climate-Based Metapopulation Malaria Model with Human Travel and Treatment Abstract: In this talk, we present single-patch and metapopulation models for malaria transmission that incorporate human movement between regions with varying climatic conditions, the use of effective and counterfeit treatments, and time-periodic parameters for mosquito dynamics. We develop an algorithm to compute the threshold condition $R_0$ for epidemiological systems derived from compartmental deterministic models. The analysis shows that when $R_0<1$, the disease-free equilibrium (DFE) is locally asymptotically stable, while $R_0>1$ leads to instability of the DFE. Under additional reasonable assumptions, we establish conditions under which the DFE is globally asymptotically stable, showing that, in many cases, this occurs precisely when $R_0≤1$. The seminar can also be accessed from Zoom: https://umanitoba.zoom.us/j/61904749902?pwd=NBzY0WN8ItdlMq2fZiKCpb1uPf8L8i.1 Meeting ID: 619 0474 9902 Passcode: 846191 See you all in the seminar! GMS Website<https://sites.google.com/view/umgradmathsociety/> / Instagram<https://www.instagram.com/umgradmathsociety/> Sincerely, Berkant<https://cnnk.xyz> GMS Executive

1 1

[GMS] Grad Seminar on November 5, Wednesday
by Berkant Cunnuk 03 Nov '25

03 Nov '25

Dear GMS, I wish this message find you well. We will have a seminar on 5th of November, Wednesday in 123 St. Paul's between 12:30 and 13:30. Our speaker is @Joshua Beaudin<mailto:beaudin3@myumanitoba.ca>. The details about his talk are below. Title: Development and Application of t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbourhood Embeddings Abstract: t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbourhood Embedding (tSNE) is a technique developed in the past couple decades which has become a commonly employed data visualization tool for statisticians. The main problem of focus is on how to map high-dimensional data into two or three dimensions such that the distribution of how the transformed data is clustered is as close as possible to its original high-dimensional distribution. tSNE is a technique aimed at addressing this problem. This talk will focus on building up the relevant theory for the derivation of the technique complete with some applications of it. The seminar can also be accessed from Zoom: https://umanitoba.zoom.us/j/61904749902?pwd=NBzY0WN8ItdlMq2fZiKCpb1uPf8L8i.1 Meeting ID: 619 0474 9902 Passcode: 846191 See you all in the seminar! GMS Website<https://sites.google.com/view/umgradmathsociety/> / Instagram<https://www.instagram.com/umgradmathsociety/> Sincerely, Berkant<https://cnnk.xyz> GMS Executive

1 0