February 24 - March 2, 2003

Monday, February 24, 2003

**10:00 AM   Director of Service Math Candidate**
           Meet with Faculty in Lounge

**4:00 PM    COLLOQUIUM     459 MSc**
           Director of Service Math Candidate


Tuesday, February 25, 2003

4:00 PM    Analysis Seminar     459 MSc
           Dr. Juan BES, BGSU
           "Hypercyclic subspaces and the essential spectrum, Part II"


Wednesday, February 26, 2003

12:30 PM   Lukacs Lecture     459 MSc
           Dr. Damodar SHANBHAG, Visiting Lukacs Professor
           "Damage Models"


Thursday, February 27, 2003

11:30 AM   Algebra Seminar     400 MSc
           Dr. Corneliu HOFFMAN, BGSU
           "Theory of Buildings, Part II"


Friday, February 28, 2003

12:00 PM   Calendar Information due to Cyndi
           for inclusion in next week's calendar listing

2:30 PM    Building (Groups and Geometries) Seminar   459 MSc
           Drs. Corneliu HOFFMAN and Sergey SHPECTOROV, BGSU
           "Open Questions, continued"

3:30 PM    COLLOQUIUM     459 MSc

           Dr. Krzysztof PODGORSKI, Indiana Univ-Purdue Univ, Indianapolis

           "Generalized Laplace Distributions - an alternative to heavy tails"
           
           ABSTRACT: For many years the Laplace distribution was
           in a sense a step daughter among continuous
           distributions. The dominance of the normal (the so
           called Gauss or Gauss-Laplace distribution) and the
           method of least-squares is overwhelming in literature.
           The Laplace distribution on the other hand possesses
           an "ugly" sharp needle at its mode (a lack of
           differentiability is in contrast with the smoothness
           of the normal function) and is geared - as far as
           inference is concerned - towards the L_1 metric - a
           method of minimizing sum of absolute deviations which
           in pre-computer era was a substantial obstacle and
           drawback. Of course objections to absolute deviation
           and non differentiability at a single point are
           irrelevant nowadays, but prejudices die hard,
           especially if there seems to be no obvious need for
           change. However in many real life situation there is a
           need for models alternative to the symmetric
           ``short-tailed'' Gaussian domain. In this context, a
           lot of attention was given to heavy tailed
           distributions without finite second moments such as,
           for example, stable distributions.  In this talk, I
           would like to demonstrate that the Laplace
           distributions and their generalizations are attractive
           alternatives to these heavy tailed distributions. In
           fact, Laplace distributions have heavier tails than
           normal, yet, they still have finite second moments.
           They can naturally account for asymmetry, their theory
           is elegant, and statistical inference for them is
           straightforward.

A list of mathematics seminars by subject and other seminars at BGSU is available  here.

If you have comments or material for the calendar, send e-mail to Cyndi Patterson,

If you wish to be placed on the e-mail distribution list, send e-mail to Craig Zirbel,

Previous calendars are available individually or in one single file for searching.

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