Hello Math Majors,
I hope the Fall 2021 semester continues to go well for you and that your first round of mid-term exams is almost finished. At this point, we have already completed the first third of the fall semester, and I imagine that you likely feel like I do when wondering where the time went.
Have you meet with your course instructors outside of the class time? Using office hours or scheduling meetings with course instructors outside of class time is one of the many things that is important for you to do as a student. A few years ago, I was a TA for a professor who told the class that almost every student who meet with him after the first exam improved their second exam grade by almost a full letter grade (so a C become a B or a B became an A). This is an important example of how much meeting with your course instructors can help you improve in your classes. Your course instructors, and TAs if you have them, are the number one resource to help you succeed in a course, and they want to help you learn and succeed. Understandably, it can be difficult to connect with an instructor or a TA while they are lecturing to a class, which is another reason while it is so important to connect with your instructor or TA outside of class.
I know that it might seem a bit early, but now and for the next month is a great time to start planning for the Spring 2022 semester. It will only be a week or two before you will be able to see the potential schedule of classes for the Spring 2022 semester within MyRed, so starting the planning process now will give you time to identify any issues that you need to resolve and time to make decisions that might impact your plans beyond the Spring 2022. For example, you might have a hold of some kind on your ability to register for classes, and working to get the hold removed now should give you enough time to start use your Priority Registration date. Using the degree planner and your degree audit will help you plan out not just the Spring 2022 semester also future semesters as well.
Remember, first semester students for Fall 2021 have a required advising meeting that they must schedule and attend before you will be able to enroll in classes for the Spring 2022 semester. It would be to your advantage to schedule a meeting now rather than waiting until your Priority Registration Date arrives.
Students on academic probation also have required advising before you can enroll in classes for the Spring 2022 semester. Before an advising meeting, you need to complete a probation self-assessment form through your MyRed To-Do items. I would strongly recommend that you complete the self-assessment form and schedule an advising meeting as soon as possible.
Best wishes, Doug
Math Colloquia
Scott Hottovy, United States Naval Academy: Simple Stochastic Models of the Tropical Atmosphere and MJO
Friday, October 1 at 4:00-4:50 pm in 115 Avery Hall
As tropical storms go, you have probably heard of Hurricanes, Tropical Cyclones, El Niño, and La Niña. But you probably haven’t heard of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). It is the major contributor to rainfall in tropical regions and influences the climate in the United States regularly. Unlike Hurricanes and El Niño, the MJO is still not well understood. In an effort to understand the mechanisms of the MJO, I will describe a model building from a dynamically stationary “background” tropical rainfall model and coupling that to a tropical wave model. These models use Stochastic Differential Equations (SDE) and Stochastic Partial Differential Equations (SPDE) as the building blocks. In the “background” model, an SDE model is used which leads to characteristics of criticality and phase transitions. For the full model with waves, we use a continuous one-dimensional SPDE. Because of the simplicity of the models, we are able to solve many statistics exactly, or run fast numerical experiments.
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