Thanks to all who attended this year's ASU Math Awareness Events!

Friday, April 0
1:40 pm PSA 103 map	Actuarial Career Day Featuring an introduction to the actuarial profession, and panel discussions with recent students who are now actuaries, and representatives of various insurance companies. See the fliers posted around PSA for more information, or make inquiries to Don Stewart (480) 965-3495, stewart@math.la.asu.edu.
Friday, April 7 and Saturday, April 8
Southwestern Sectional MAA Meeting
9:00 am Memorial Union	This sectional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America is an excellent opportunity to see mathematics and mathematics education at its newest and best. For more information, see http://math.la.asu.edu/~brl/MAA/meeting.html
Thursday, April 13
Math Awareness Colloquium
4:00 pm PSF 101 map	Hélène Barcelo, Arizona State University Women Count: Famous Female Mathematicians and their Work Throughout history, women have produced great mathematics, often under challenging circumstances. For example, Emmy Noether was the first to give rigorous definitions of rings and ideals. Sophie Germain was the first to treat several cases of Fermat's Theorem all at once; before her, piecemeal efforts to prove that  xn + yn = zn  has no integer solutions for  n > 2  had only produced results for  n = 3, 4, and 5. In this talk, I'll discuss the fascinating lives and seminal work of only a few of the many great female mathematicians of the last two centuries.
5:00 pm	Math Barbecue Join us for a barbecue social gathering following the colloquium, in the courtyard bounded on the north and west by PSA, on the south by Tyler Mall, and on the east by the line  y = 2 x. Tickets are $1 before noon on Monday, April 10, and $2 after. They may be purchased at the Mathematics Department front desk (PSA 216).
Thursday, April 20
ASU MAM Featured Speaker
7:00 pm Neeb 105 map	Richard Voss, Center for Complex Systems, Florida Atlantic University Mountains, Clouds, and the Music of the Markets The mathematics of fractal geometry and the science of chaos are now bridging the gaps between math, science, art, and culture. They treat the messiness of the everyday world. They are based on natural self-similarity (a small branch of a tree reminds one of the entire tree) and observations of complicated behavior from simple equations. They provide a new mathematical language for capturing, manipulating, and simulating nature. The lecture will illustrate the descriptive and creative power of fractals and chaos through computer-generated images, animation, sounds, and music. Examples of practical applications of fractals to economics, DNA sequences, early Chinese landscape paintings, and x-ray mammograms will be presented. The unity of building mountains and clouds from mathematics and generating music from the stock market will be demonstrated.
Thursday, April 27
Math Awareness Colloquium
4:00 pm PSF 101 map	Charles Tier, University of Illinois at Chicago Some Ins and Outs and Ups and Downs of Financial Derivatives Financial derivatives are a multi-trillion dollar component of today's financial markets and often play a key role in complicated financial transactions. Because of their importance, the study of financial derivatives has grown dramatically in the financial industry. We present an overview of financial derivatives including options and ones of a more exotic nature. An understanding of their behavior requires tools from probability theory and the theory of partial differential equations. We illustrate how several problems from finance can be analyzed using applied mathematics techniques. The results range from exact formulas to approximate and computational solutions.
5:15 pm PSA 206 map	Math Movie Night Following the colloquium, meet for free pizza and drinks, followed by a screening of two excellent mathematical movies: The Proof, a documentary on the recent proof of Fermat's Theorem; and Sneakers, the 1992 thriller about computers, cryptography, and espionage.