Join us this Tuesday on Oct 8th, 2015, 4:00-6:00PM (Talk beings at 4:30PM) for our first installment of this year’s MUGS series with Jonathan Love. Jonathan used to be the president of MU in 2012-2013. Currently he is furthering his education in the University of Toronto as a first year Master student in Mathematics. In his spare time, he plays different kinds of musical instruments and he does theater acting. His skills in music and acting and his passion in teaching, no doubt, is going to bring the classroom environment alive.
Refreshments will be provided. Hope to see you there.

Location: To be determined.

Abstract: There’s more than one way to measure size and distance in the rational numbers! After describing a few of these exotic absolute values (focusing on the p-adic absolute values for each prime number p), we’ll prove Ostrowski’s Theorem, which provides a classification of all possible absolute values on the rationals. For such a deep theorem, the proof remarkably requires no prerequisites beyond a high school math background, so this talk is especially suited for first or second year students who want to see what the proof of a significant mathematical result looks like.