All talks are on Thursday from 3:00 until 4:00 in Science Center 232 unless otherwise indicated. (It is on Thursday 5:00-6:00 in SC 507 during the fall term; note the change.)
To see last year's Trivial Notions page, look here.
(Click on the title of a talk to get the abstract.)
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| 20 September 2007 | Qualifying Exam | |
| 27 September 2007 | Dawei Chen | G.I.T. |
| 4 October 2007 | Anh-Vinh Le | Why does characteristic polynomial factor? |
| 11 October 2007 | Jesse Kass | Is Mg connected? |
| 18 October 2007 | Reid Barton | Representation theory of the symmetric group |
| 25 October 2007 | Jeechul Woo | How can we find elliptic curves having many rational points? |
| 1 November 2007 | PoNing Chen | Framed Cobordism |
| 8 November 2007 | Wushi Goldring | Talk Canceled |
| 15 November 2007 | Aaron Silberstein | Descent and Cohomology |
| 22 November 2007 | Thanksgiving break | |
| 29 November 2007 | Harald Helfgott (IAS/Bristol) | Growth in groups - abelian and otherwise (The speaker is invited by Aaron) |
| 6 December 2007 | David Harvey | What does Cp look like? |
| 14 December 2007 | Frederick Van-Der-Wyck | A practical introduction to deformation theory |
| 20 December 2007 | Winter break | |
| 27 December 2007 | Winter break | |
| The month of January | Winter break, finals, more break...no one would come, anyway | |
| 31 January 2008 | Valentino Tosatti | Kähler, Calabi and Yau |
| 8 February 2008 | Samuel Isaacson | Brown representability |
| 14 February 2008 | Ji Oon Lee | Certain types of the uncertainty principle |
| 21 February 2008 | Evan Bullock | Coupling from the Past |
| 28 February 2008 | Ryan Reich | Basic Calculus |
| 7 March 2008 | Samik Basu | Pontrjagin classes and some homotopic manifolds which are not diffeomorphic |
| 13 March 2008 | Ruifang Song | Du Val singularities and McKay correspondence |
| 20 March 2008 | Ming-Tao Chuan | Balanced, but not Kähler |
| 27 March 2008 | Spring break | |
| 3 April 2008 | Kai-Wen Lan | Duality and Plethysm |
| 10 April 2008 | David Roe | Automorphisms of Riemann Surfaces |
| 17 April 2008 | Chung-Jun Tsai | Gauss-Bonnet |
| 24 April 2008 | Si Li | Rational curves in P2 |
| 1 May 2008 | Thomas Koberda | Homology 3-Spheres and Mapping Class Groups |
The Trivial Notions seminar is held once a week in the Mathematics Department at Harvard University. The target audience is the graduate student body of the Department, and those giving talks are (almost always) graduate students in the Department. Talks can be on any topic, but they should be accessible to graduate students!
The seminar is a great way to find out what other students are thinking about. It's also a great way to practice talking mathematics in front of others, without the distraction of scary professors in the audience.
The seminar is organized this year by Si Li and Chung-Jun Tsai. Please send one of us an email if you have any questions or if you want to add yourself to the schedule.
This page was based on the previous year's one, which was based on the one from two years before, by David Harvey.