North Carolina State Dinner of the Mathematical Association of America

The 2019 North Carolina State Dinner of the Mathematical Association of America will take place Friday, Sept. 27, at the UNC Asheville Sherrill Center. The evening will feature poster presentations from selected undergraduate students from North Carolina universities and a talk by Jane Hawkins, professor emerita at UNC-Chapel Hill and treasurer of the American Mathematical Society.

This is a public event; tickets, available for $25.50, must be purchased online here in advance.

Agenda for the evening at UNC Asheville’s Sherrill Center:

5:15 p.m. – Registration opens at the entrance to the Sherrill Center in Rocky’s Doghouse

5:30 p.m. – Student Poster Session with light h’ors d’oeuvres on the Kimmel Arena Concourse in the Sherrill Center

6:30 p.m. – Dinner in the Ingles Mountain View Room and Arby’s Scholarship Deck in the Sherrill Center

7:15 p.m. – Entropy and the Genome, a talk by Jane Hawkins in the Ingles Mountain View Room

Abstract: The entropy of a dynamical system is a measure of its complexity, which in turn reflects how its evolution over time seems to exhibit randomness. We discuss its origins as Shannon entropy, developed by Claude Shannon as a way of measuring uncertainty in strings of text and sometimes called information theory. A modern application is to use entropy to help classify and understand the evolution of some common viruses. The papilloma virus (PV) infects animals from birds, rabbits and cats to cattle, horses and humans. There are many different types of PV and while they all have some negative health effects, only a few are deadly. We discuss how entropy helps to solve the huge classification problem for PVs to better understand their evolution in order to eradicate the worst types.

For more information, please contact Sheryl Donaldson in UNC Asheville’s Department of Mathematics, 828.251.6556 or sdonalds@unca.edu.

Building accessibility information is available here.

Accessibility Contact: Diane Buzzini (828.251.6934) dbuzzini@unca.edu

Visitor Parking on the UNC Asheville Campus – Visitors may park in faculty/staff and non-resident lots from 5:00 p.m. until 7:30 a.m., Monday through Friday, and on weekends, holidays, and campus breaks. Visitors are not permitted to park in resident student lots at any time.