All talks are on Thursday from 2:00 until 3:00 in Science Center 507 unless otherwise indicated.
Previous years Trivial Notions pages:
(Click on the title of a talk to get the abstract.)
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| 18 September 2008 | Qualifying Exam | |
| 25 September 2008 | Yi Li | The Combinatorics of Hodge Integrals |
| 2 October 2008 | Eric Wofsey | How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Transfinite Induction |
| 9 October 2008 | Aaron Silberstein | Intersection Homology: Saving Poincaré Duality |
| 16 October 2008 | Sam Isaacson | Stable Splittings of Spaces |
| 23 October 2008 | Thomas Barnet-Lamb | How to Vote |
| 30 October 2008 | Ethan Street | The Geometry of Rigid Body Dynamics, or, How Not to Throw Books |
| 6 November 2008 | Katy Körner | A Brief Overview of the Philosophy of Mathematics |
| 13 November 2008 | Jack Huizenga | How To Count Like Schubert |
| 20 November 2008 | Carl Erickson | Modular Forms and You |
| 27 November 2008 | Thanksgiving | No Seminar. |
| 4 December 2008 | Maryanthe Malliaris (UC Berkeley) | Pseudofinite sets |
| 11 December 2008 | Thomas Koberda | How to Abelianize Groups That Are Difficult to Abelianize |
| 18 December 2008 | Winter break | |
| The month of January | No Seminar. | |
| 5 February 2009 | Valentino Tosatti | Metric Sociology |
| 12 February 2009 | Samik Basu | Hirzebruch Problem 8 |
| 19 February 2009 | Chen-Yu Chi | Be Rational, Geometry! |
| 26 February 2009 | David Roe | The Weil Conjectures |
| 5 March 2009 | Ana Caraiani | Stacks for Dummies |
| 12 March 2009 | Si Li | Feynman Integrals and Three-fold Invariants |
| 19 March 2009 | Tanya Kobylyatskaya | A Gentle Introduction to Heegaard Floer Homology |
| 26 March 2009 | Spring break | |
| 2 April 2009 | Ryan Reich | Evaluating Bézout's Theorem |
| 9 April 2009 | Yu-Shen Lin | Mirror Symmetry and Predicting Enumerative Invariants |
| 16 April 2009 | David Geraghty | Representations of Gal(\overline{Q}/Q) |
| 23 April 2009 | Jack Thorne | Toric Varieties |
| 30 April 2009 | Aleksandar Subotic | Homological Mirror Symmetry for the Elliptic Curve |
The Trivial Notions seminar is held once a week in the Mathematics Department at Harvard University. The target audience is the graduate student body of the Department, and those giving talks are (almost always) graduate students in the Department. Talks can be on any topic, but they should be accessible to graduate students!
The seminar is a great way to find out what other students are thinking about. It's also a great way to practice talking mathematics in front of others, without the distraction of scary professors in the audience.
The seminar is organized this year by Katy Körner and Thomas Koberda. Please send one of us an email if you have any questions or if you want to add yourself to the schedule.
This page was based on the previous year's one, which was based on the previous year's one, which was based on the one from three years before, by David Harvey.