November 13 - 19, 2000

Monday, November 13, 2000

3:30 PM   Advisory Committee     458 MSc

3:30 PM     Lukacs Lecture     459 MSc
      Nozer SINGPURWALLA, George Washington University
      "The Hazard Potential of Items and Individuals"

      ABSTRACT: We introduce here a notion that is relevant to
      reliability and survival analysis. It pertains to a random
      resource that items and individuals possess; an item fails when
      this resource gets exhausted. The cumulative failure rate
      describes the rate at which the resource gets consumed.  The
      notion given above enables us to characterize all survival
      distributions in terms of the exponential. Furthermore, we are
      able to show that a collection of dependent life times can be
      represented as a collection of independent exponential
      distributions, each indexed on a different time scale.


Tuesday, November 14, 2000

2:30 PM     Algebra Seminar     459 MSc

4:00 PM     Lukacs Lecture     459 MSc
      Nozer SINGPURWALLA, George Washington University
      "Optimum Reliability Allocation"

      ABSTRACT: We discuss how to allocate reliability to the
      components of a system or a network so as to optimize an overall
      utility function. The work described here shows an interesting
      interplay between optimization theory and the behaviour of
      survival functions with a monotone failure rate.

7:00 PM     KME Open Forum     459 MSc


Wednesday, November 15, 2000



Thursday, November 16, 2000

2:30 PM     Scientific Computation Seminar     459 MSc
      Daria FILIPPOVA, BGSU
      "Estimation of the Error in the Parabolic
      Equations and Generalized Gronwall's Inequality"

4:00 PM     COLLOQUIUM - Joint with ASOR     459 MSc
      M. C. AGRAWAL, Akron University
      "Some Salient and Sensible Aspects (with Special Reference to
      Predictive Estimation) of Finite Population Sampling"

      ABSTRACT: Certain typical results that characterize survey
      sampling will be highlighted.  In particular, some interesting
      aspects relating to "predictive estimation" under
      fixed-population and superpopulation approaches will be
      presented.

4:30 PM     Analysis Seminar     340 MSc
      Neal L. CAROTHERS, BGSU
      "The Dunford-Pettis Property"


Friday, November 17, 2000

3:30 PM     COLLOQUIUM     459 MSc
      Corneliu HOFFMAN, BGSU
      "Children Drawings, Number Theory and, Of Course,
      Group Theory"

      ABSTRACT: I will survey a few applications of group theory in
      various areas of number theory.

      The main topic will involve Grothendieck famed dessins d'enfants
      (children drawings), a combinatorial machinery used to study
      strange beings such as the absolute Galois group of the rational
      numbers.  To cite Grothendieck "... here I was brought back, via
      objects so simple that a child learns them while playing, to the
      beginnings and origins of algebraic geometry, familiar to
      Riemann and his followers."