Faculty Listing--Rick Kreminski
Math office: Binnion 305. For the current (2008-2009) academic
year, I continue to serve as Head of the Department of Mathematics.
Telephone: (903)886-5157 (Binnion)
FAX: (903)886-5945 (Binnion)
E-mail: kremin@boisdarc.tamu-commerce.edu
This web page is located at
http://www.tamu-commerce.edu/math/FACULTY/KREMIN/kremin.html
SB (Biology), MIT, 1981; MA, Maryland, 1990; PhD, Maryland
(Interdisciplinary
Applied Mathematics), 1994; JD, Dedman School of Law, Southern
Methodist University, 2008. PhD dissertation title: Graded
manifolds with
spin-conformal structure; my advisor was Dr. Paul Green.
Office hours for fall 2009: see your course syllabus.
(But I generally am available all day every day except for class and meetings.
Still, contacting me by
email is the best way to get hold of me.)
Research interests, broadly speaking, include applications
of differential geometry, group theory,
algebraic topology and
algebraic geometry
to quantum field theory, particle physics, and general
relativity. Other interests have included numerical analysis
(e.g. accelerating convergence of series; gamma function approximation;
the numerical approximation of Stieltjes
constants, along with some
Stieltjes
supplemental computatations; computing generalized
Euler-Zagier sums)
and the
(seemingly arcane?)
point-set topology of finite topological spaces. I'm also interested in
applications of mathematics to biology, finance, political science,...
A listing
of most of my publications is available
here.
Besides the topics listed above, I am interested in implementing
computational and
graphics algorithms in Mathematica, whether in number theory,
combinatorics and probability and statistics,
Lie groups (rotation groups in both Euclidean space Rn and
Minkowski spacetime Rn-1,1),
wavelets, dynamical systems, etc.
I wish I had more time to spend trying to learn twistor theory in
algebraic geometry (see link below), as
well as level-set methods in differential geometry, including
writing Mathematica code. And hopefully someday I will be able
to find out what string theorists have been doing for the past 10
years.
Links of possible interest (some of which are relatively old):
- The
Mathematician of the Day site at St. Andrews has much information
about the history of mathematics.
- The on-line version of Neil Sloane's Encylopedia
of integer
sequences has well over 100000 sequences for lookup, either
by values or by author.
- Three very useful sites that are quite encylopedic: Steve
Finch's
favorite mathematical constants, Mathworld by Eric Weisstein,
and the relatively new PlanetMath
by, well,
lots of people.
(The related Treasure Trove
site
by
Eric Weisstein is also quite good. Another source, an
all-purpose encyclopedia, is Wikipedia.)
- Free online mathematical reviews are available through Zentralblatt. Similarly,
the archives
at UCDavis house many preprints.
- The homepage of the campus chapter of Sigma Xi
The Scientific Research Society can be accessed here,
for general information as well as schedules of upcoming events. There
are links
to organizations and other sites of interest to the scientific
community (not just math).
- Mathematica-generated graphics, depicting a non-standard
visualization of the Hopf fibration S3->S2->S1,
via the fibration
RP3->S2->S1, are available here.
A link to a .dvi file of a paper on this topic is
available there too. (Unfortunately, the .dvi file doesn't have any of
the graphics in it.) Links to some Java applets based on
some of the figures are also given there.
- (Old, pre-2002) information about the Texas Twistors, an informal
offshoot of
the North Texas Relativity Seminar dealing with issues related to
twistor theory, is available here.
Meetings have always been
held sporadically, varying from several times
a month to once every couple months, in the Dallas metroplex. Limited
summaries of past meetings, and dates and
times of future meetings, are available at the web site.
- IF your browser supports Java 1.0, go here
to view a map on the torus that requires seven colors to be
a legitimate coloring. (Note there that every one of the
seven countries
shares some boundary with each of the other six countries.
Equivalently,
the coloring indicates that one can
embed a K7 on the torus.)
Go here
to view a 3D-graphic illustrating what went wrong with a pseudo-random
number generator, "RANDU", that was popular in the
early 1970s.
[But if that applet does not load properly, a temporary
file is available
here.]
Go here
to practice composing rotations, i.e. for
practice in trying to guess
the product of two or more rotations.
Go here
to view a 3D-graphic illustrating a possibly new approach to graphing
surfaces
in R3. And go here
to view a 3D-graphic illustrating the 60-element group known as
A5 (the alternating group on 5 symbols). [Another graphic,
illustrating
S4 (the symmetric group on 4 symbols) is available here.]
- (Possibly inactive: for those using Netscape as their browser, maybe here
is/was a quite rudimentary javascript self-scoring math/general info quiz.)
- Other, unrelated, Mathematica-generated graphics:
If the network is fast enough, go here
to view some fractal
trees from a summer 2000 course offering, and here
(December 2001) and here
(December 2002)
[or maybe
here
(December 2002)]
for recent seasonal variations
(with a different fractal seasonal greeting,
December 2003, here,
another fractal greeting,
December 2004, here,
and another greeting,
December 2005, here).
And go here for a math logo.
These
graphics may be
slow to load, but if you hit reload probably will load much more
quickly. (They are
animated, but that might be browswer - version - number - dependent!)
More Mathematica-generated graphics:
The first one (...depicting
the motion of a point on a "wheel", which in turn is moving on a
"wheel" of different radius and different rotational frequency, and
which in turn is moving on yet another "wheel" with still
a different radius and rotational frequency...)
is housed here.
The next two show some 'fractiles' (fractal tilings of
the plane), here and here. Another seasonal
rendering, this one of a fractal shamrock, is available here.
And last (for now),
two distinct initial condition implementations of
John Conway's Game of Life are visible here
and here.
- The Mathematica notebook for the
shortcourse I presented
at the Texas Section of the MAA meeting in Houston on March 29, 2001
is available here. When you activate the link
to it, presumably you can
save the notebook
to your harddrive (especially if using Internet Explorer,
although Netscape should be fine too, depending on your
browser version). A not-so-great web rendition of the
notebook is available
for those who don't have Mathematica or
who just want to see what's in the notebook.
- The birthday paradox seems to surprise everyone
when they first learn about it; some data
are available here.
For instance, the probability is over 85% that in a
room of 50 randomly
chosen people, on at least two days, there are least two people
with the same birth date. (And over a 97% chance that in that
same room, there's at least one day with at least two people with
the same birthdate.)
Similarly, partitioning problems (applied to money) also
seem to surprise people; data are available here.For instance, there are 252 (213, respectively) ways
to come up with $.99, if you are allowed to use a half-dollar coin
(respectively, just the usual penny, nickel, dime, and quarter coins).
Finally, there are numerous instances in mathematics of
things that initially seem paradoxical; we are collecting
such examples, ranging from elementary to somewhat deeper levels,
in a site we tentatively call Strange...
but true.
- Seven-year-old-page: The tragic, dramatic loss of life on 11
September 2001 is depicted in a rudimentary web page that, hopefully
sometime in the future,
will more generally
depict 'vital statistics' in real time. The page as it now
stands can be accessed here.
Lastly, I've had this link on this page for years; and then
they went public and produced many billionaires (my favorite search engine over the years - and if you
didn't already, you missed out on google answers; but they have many other apps like
google scholar, etc):
This page is maintained by Rick Kreminski,
and was last updated on September 18, 2003.
"The views and opinions expressed on this page are strictly those of
the page author."