| Abstract:
Don’t worry. I won’t be crooning old cowboy songs. Instead I will
present some fascinating examples where the solution to a problem can
be visualized as a saddle point or mountain pass. The mathematical
prerequisite for the first example is to be able to play the game
rock-paper-scissors. The next examples are related to common
undergraduate courses such as linear algebra and ordinary differential
equations, and have wonderful connections to such “real world”
phenomena as the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster. Several suggestions
for student research projects will be mentioned. The last example will
briefly describe a research level problem in nonlinear analysis. |