Ada Boralevi
Online seminar - 09 February 2022 - 5:00 p.m. (duration 30-40 min)
In 1770, English mathematician E. Waring claimed, without proving it, that “every natural number is the sum of at most 9 cubes, at most 19 fourth powers, and so on...” Only Hilbert, more than 100 years later, managed to prove the truth of this statement.
The natural question of whether or not a similar property applies to polynomials had to wait until 1995 for an answer.
We will talk about these great mathematicians and their ideas, and discover that these theories have surprising applications in fields such as signal processing for telecommunications.
Paolo Brandimarte
Online seminar - 23 February 2022 - 5:00 p.m. (duration 1h)
How can we determine the price to apply to a new product or service? How can we choose its characteristics based on the preferences of potential consumers? How can we segment the market (based on gender, age, lifestyle, values, etc.) in order to identify the right target for our proposal? Mathematics plays a fundamental role in these and other marketing problems. In our short orientation seminar, we will see how some supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, common in artificial intelligence, can be applied in the context of quantitative marketing.
Marco Morandotti
Online activity - 09 March 2022 - 5:00 p.m.
Today's technological and social challenges require the ability to solve complex problems that at first glance seem insurmountable. We hear it everywhere: the most efficient strategy for solving a “big” problem is to break it down into “smaller” problems and assemble their solutions.
In the activity we propose, students will be faced with problems of varying complexity and will be encouraged to solve them using a synoptic view of the problem and identifying its basic components.
Francesco Malaspina
Online seminar - 29 March 2022 - 5:00 p.m. (duration 1 hour)
Mathematical language allows us to approach the poignant and fascinating topic of infinity from various angles.
We will take a brief look at some of these through hypercubes, meringues, and soccer references.
Luca Lussardi
Online seminar - 13 April 2022 - 5:00 p.m. (duration 30 min)
Starting from Einstein's brilliant ideas on space-time, we see that physics becomes geometry (non-Euclidean): Einstein versus Newton, the force of gravity exits the scene, and the geometry of curved spaces answers questions that have been open for hundreds of years.
This formidable scientific discovery has raised awareness even among the general public, is supported by all experiments carried out to date (most recently the famous detection of gravitational waves), and has had important applications in everyday life.
Luigi Preziosi
Online seminar - 27 April 2022 - 5:00 p.m.
In many industrial sectors, driven by the need to optimize processes and therefore understand the phenomena involved, decisions and production initiatives are increasingly based on the development and use of mathematical models. In this meeting, after introducing the concept of mathematical models, we will apply it to the problems encountered in some countries with large arid and desert areas in the design and construction of high-speed railways or for transporting goods and minerals. As one might imagine, wind-blown sand is a serious obstacle for trains traveling through these areas: it engulfs the tracks, wears down rails and wheels, and causes derailments. It is therefore necessary to analyze the scenarios that may be encountered before embarking on such ventures. This is done by developing appropriate mathematical models, which are then analyzed qualitatively and through numerical simulations. Mathematics is therefore a tool for choosing the optimal routes and identifying the best solutions, and thus identifying protection systems while also predicting maintenance times and costs more efficiently.
Chiara Giverso
Online seminar - 25 May 2022 - 5:00 p.m.
Mathematics can be a valuable tool for explaining the progression of a phenomenon that has irrevocably disrupted our daily lives: the COVID-19 pandemic. During this seminar, we will derive some simple epidemiological models and show how they can predict the progression of the pandemic over time, starting from real data, in order to guide our actions and political and social choices.