CUMC 2009

I need to write a "short description of my experience at CUMC" for this year so I can claim some money. Since I wrote the one for last year here, I figured I might as well do this one here too. CUMC happened almost 2 months ago, so this report is sort of overdue.

This year's CUMC happened in Ottawa at Carleton University - Canada's Capital University (no really, that's their motto). It was my third time attending CUMC after Simon Fraser in 2007 and Toronto in 2008. I drove down with a McGill delegation of 6 students in my parents' Mazda 5. The car ride was a bit crowded but much cheaper than most other travel alternatives. At the conference, there were many familiar faces—people I had met at previous CUMCs or that I had met a month earlier at the PIMS Summer School in Algebra in Edmonton—and there were also many new faces which I had the pleasure of meeting.

I gave a talk on the Gershgorin circle theorem. I think this talk actually went really well. I think I have been steadily getting better at giving talks. My abstract must also have been pretty good because it attracted one of the highest attendences in the entire conference aside for the keynote talks. Maybe it is my use of the word "cute" which attracted people:

Gershgorin and his circles. 25 minutes.

We will prove a result that was proved by Gershgorin in 1931. The theorem gives some idea about the location of the eigenvalues of a square matrix. It is very cute and elegant and turns out to have interesting applications. We will investigate some of these applications. Only basic knowledge of linear algebra and analysis is required. P.S.: I will try to include nice drawings if I have the time.

In any case, this talk was certainly better than the disaster that I performed in 2007 and my talk on the Lambda Calculus in 2008.

I look forward to next year's CUMC which will be in Waterloo.