Public Lectures
The Mathematics Department organizes the Annual Julian Clancy Frazier Colloquium, whose purpose is to expose midshipmen to the latest and most exciting ideas in mathematics. This lecture series is supported by Ms. Jean S. Clancy in memory of her son, a devoted mathematics student and educator. Ms. Clancy also sponsors the annual Award for Excellence in Mathematics, which recognizes a midshipman who has demonstrated exceptional performance in the mathematics honors program.
The Mathematics Department also participates in the Michelson Memorial Lecture Series that commemorates the achievements of Albert A. Michelson, whose experiments on the measurement of the speed of light were initiated while he was a military instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy.
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Apr142026
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Vector Factories & Hyperplanes: How Geometry Powers Machine LearningJames G. ScottUniversity of Texas at AustinLocation: MAHAN AUDITORIUMTime: 12:40 PMView AbstractHow can a computer learn to reason about language, recognize images, or make predictions from messy real-world information? Before any learning can begin, a more basic problem must be solved: how can words, pictures, and other awkward forms of data be represented in a form that mathematics can work with? In this talk, I explore two key geometric ideas behind that translation. The first is what we might call “vector factories,” which in machine learning are called “embeddings": methods that convert raw, unstructured inputs into vectors of numbers that can be analyzed mathematically. The second idea is hyperplanes: once data are represented as points in a high-dimensional Euclidean space, learning often amounts to drawing simple boundaries that separate different kinds of points and allow machines to classify, predict, and decide. Machine learning is far broader than these two ideas, but a remarkable amount of it can be understood through this geometric lens. This talk offers an intuitive and visual introduction to how modern machine-learning systems are built from these simple ingredients.
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Jan292025
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JCF: Mathematics of Frozen Seas
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Mar212024
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JCF: Active learning methods on graphs for image, video, and multispectral datasets
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Feb012023
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JCF: Juggling Counts
