Nathan Kaplan

nckaplan@math.uci.edu


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Seminars and Conferences

I am currently one of the organizers of the UC Irvine Number Theory Seminar. Here is a link to our upcoming and reccent talks .

I am an organizer of the Southern California Number Theory Day at UC Irvine conference series.  Our next meeting will be on Saturday, October 7th, 2023.  Here is the conference webpage.  Here is the webpage for SCNTD 2022, and here is a link to some webpages for conferences in previous years.

I was an organizer for the Conference on Open Questions in Cryptography and Number Theory in honor of Alice Silverberg's 60th Birthday. The conference took place at UC Irvine September 17-21, 2018.

In 2013-14 I helped organize the Yale Number Theory Seminar. In Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 I helped organize the Yale Algebra and Number Theory Seminar. I also helped to organize the Algebraic and Tropical Geometry meeting BATMOBYLE in Fall 2014 andSpring 2015.

Undergraduate Research

I would highly encourage undergraduates to apply for summer research programs. Here are a few programs that I am familiar with and would definitely recommend.

If you are a current UCI undergraduate looking for opportunities to do research on campus, check out the UROP website.

UCI has several programs to promote diversity in research on campus. SURF is a program where non-UCI undegraduates spend the summer doing research at UCI. The Competitive Edge summer program is for incoming UCI graduate students looking to get an early start on research.

If you have questions about any of these programs feel free to send me an email.

Outreach

I am also interested in other types of mathematical outreach. In July 2022 I gave a talk in the Math Encounters series at the Museum of Mathematics in New York City: Error-Correcting Codes: The Mathematics of Communication.  For the slides that accompany this talk, click here. I have given a talk in the Math Mornings program at Yale: Points, Lines & Puzzles.

I have given talks at the UCI Math Circle, the Southern California State MathCounts competition, the Hunter College High School Science Research Seminar, the UCI Anteater Mathematics Club, the Yale Undergraduate Math Society, the Family Fridays program at the Museum of Mathematics, and at a math circle on Long Island. I have given several talks for undergraduate math clubs and REU groups and was a plenary speaker at the Undergraduate Mathematics Symposium at UIC in 2018.

In graduate school I taught a 10-hour minicourse called A Mathematical Look at Some Popular Games. In this course we explored some of the math behind Tic-Tac-Toe, Sudoku, SET, and several other games.

Trivia

I really enjoy trivia and have appeared on five game shows. In November of 2009 I appeared on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, in Septeber of 2013 I was on The Million Second Quiz, in May of 2015 I was on Let's Ask America, in May 2016 I was on 500 Questions, and in July 2019 I was on Jeopardy. Yale News wrote an article about my adventures in the game show universe.

Nathan on
        MillionaireNathan on MSQNathan on Let's Ask America
Nathan on 500
        Questions Nathan on Jeopardy



My favorite numbers are 20,213, (π^2)/6, and 52,416,000.