When and Where
Fridays
3:30 p.m.: Refreshments in Avery Hall 348
4:00-4:50 p.m.: Talks in Avery Hall 115
Check the departmental event calendar for upcoming talks.
Scheduling
First come first served. Our stance is that local speakers should defer to visitors. If you reserve a spot for yourself to speak on a date that someone else would like to have a visitor speak on, it is appropriate for them to talk to you about changing your date and between the two of you to figure out.
Open dates
Spring 2024
| January | February | March | April | May |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 |
Fall 2024
| August | September | October | November | December |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 13, 20, 27 | 4, 11, 18, 25 | 1, 8, 15, 22 | 6, 13 |
Contact
Email Xavier Pérez Giménez (xperez@unl.edu).
- As soon as possible: visitor name, colloquium date requested, organizational affiliation, professional title, acknowledgments needed in advertising (e.g. NSF support), any special needs for the talk
- At least 2 weeks before the talk: colloquium title and abstract (in plain text (ASCII), preferably without TeX or LATeX)
Guidance and Expectations
Each colloquium should be 50 minutes long. Faculty and graduate students are encouraged to suggest colloquium speakers who are likely to give a good talk to a general mathematical audience with diverse interests. A first or second year graduate student should understand most of the talk. It is less beneficial when a speaker gives a specialized seminar that only some in the audience can follow.
Giving such talks can be tricky, and there is no simple formula. "How to give a good colloquium" by John McCarthy provides tips, and experienced speakers keep these guidelines in mind:
- Eschew jargon or remind audiences of definitions without overdoing it.
- Use mediums/technologies for transmitting information (e.g. whiteboard, projector) at a reasonable rate. Material placed on transparencies should be in a very large (at least fourteen point) font and left long enough to be read.
- A picture is worth a thousand words. Given the time frame, consider informing the audience's intuition graphically instead of precisely explaining every concept.
- Audiences love context. If Gauss thought about the problem, tell us. Connections with other areas of mathematics or other sciences are compelling, although exhaustive lists of names and dates are usually of interest only to specialists.
- Informative examples are effective for reaching out to people who might not know what is being discussed.
- Grab the audience's interest with a special case, leaving us after the lecture to go learn more
Attending Remotely
If you are working remotely (for health-related reasons) and would like to attend the colloquium, please contact Xavier Pérez Giménez for Zoom information.
Funding
The department has funds available to help defray costs of speakers. Use of other funding sources (e.g. grants, Research Council, etc) before requesting departmental support is strongly encouraged. Contact Petronela Radu.