Among the greatest creations of the human mind are good puzzles and mysteries which use ideas from mathematics and magic. We'll survey some classics old and new, many associated with Martin Gardner, "the best friend mathematics ever had."

Light refreshments will be served afterwards.

Colm Mulcahy
Department of Mathematics
Spelman College

This talk is intended to present the challenges of computer and network security to the math audience. The goal of this talk is to demystify our current troubles related to Internet security, explaining where math has worked, why software fails, and how math could or could not help enhance the computer and network security.

The presentation will start with an overview of some recent incidents related to Internet security and the levels of threat. The content following this overview will briefly cover some past successes of applying math to computer security subjects, especially cryptography. The rest of the talk will present examples of how strong cryptography and software systems fail in real systems and illustrate the challenges faced by computer system researchers.

Light refreshments will be served afterwards.

Kang Li
Department of Computer Science
University of Georgia

The Hopf fibration is a kind of projection from the three-sphere to the two-sphere. The two-sphere is the one you're likely to be familiar with--a beach ball is a good example. The two-sphere is formed by all points which are a constant distance from a center point. We write the two-sphere as S2 to indicate that it is 2-dimensional.

Light refreshments will be served afterwards.

Niles Johnson
Department of Mathematics
University of Georgia

For any questions or suggestions or to join our listserv to stay up-to-date about our exciting series of events, write The Math Club at mathclub@uga.edu.