HCM Graduate Colloquium, Winter Term 2025/26

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Organisers: Michel Alexis, Regula Krapf

This seminar is organised as a BIGS event. The goal is to present topics from all areas of mathematics in an elementary and informal way. The talks should be accessible to a general mathematical audience and are mainly aimed at BIGS students and postdocs.

Everybody (students, postdocs, faculty, guests) is welcome to attend.
If you would like to give a talk please contact us.

The seminar will take place Wednesdays 15:15 - 16:45 in the Lipschitzsaal. The talks will usually take about one hour and there is the subsequent possibility to ask questions. Coffee, tea and cake will be served beforehand between 15:00 and 15:15 in the Plückerraum.

A predecessor of the HCM Graduate Colloquium is the Basic Notions Seminar which took place until 2017:
Basic Notions Seminar Summer Term 2017

Date	Speaker	Topic
22.10.2025	Michel Alexis (MI)	Calculus teachers hate him because of this one weird trick, find out why!!
26.11.2025	María Inés de Frutos Fernández (MI)	Tba
17.12.2025	David Aretz (MPIM)	Tba
21.01.2026	Annabell Gros (IAM)	Tba
04.02.2026	Tba	Tba

Abstracts

October 22, 2025: Michel Alexis (MI)

Title: Calculus teachers hate him because of this one weird trick, find out why!!

Abstract. I’ll present the concept of dyadic decomposition, a simple but stupidly effective technique for quickly estimating various sums and integrals, all without computing a single anti-derivative. We’ll discuss topics ranging from the p-test in Calculus to the Calderon-Zygmund decomposition for estimating averaging operators and the Hardy-Littlewood maximal function.