Daily Archives: December 10, 2015

Volunteers needed for information stations

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It’s that time of year again, and we are looking for volunteers to help staff the Winter 2016 Information/Roaming Stations, Monday, January 11 – Tuesday, January 12.

Please consider signing up to help! This system does not work without a LOT of wonderful vounteers. The links for sign up spreadsheets are listed below.

  • 4th Floor Main Information Station Sign-Up – click here
  • Sneden 1st Floor Information Station Sign Up – click here

If you experience any issues with the sign up process, please contact Ashleigh Begres at ashleighbegres@grcc.edu or extension 2477. Thank you for your commitment to our students! Your help is greatly appreciated!

GRCC Bookstore: December 9 & 10 – Two Day Tiered Sale!

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The GRCC Bookstore is having a 2 Day pre-holiday sale on Gift and Clothing items! Stock up on your cold weather gear, GRCC logo clothing or pick up a gift! Most Dell laptops are also discounted (see below). Clearance items are not included in this sale.

Apparel and Gifts

20% Off – Purchase of One item

25% Off – Purchase of Two items

30% Off – Purchase of Three or MORE items

 

Selected Dell Notebooks

$100 Off! (in-stock only)

Dell Inspiron 14 5000 I3 4GB RAM 1TB

Dell Inspiron 14 5000 I5 8GB RAM 1TB

Dell Inspiron 11 Flip 4GB RAM 500GB

Mathematics Seminar is today

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The Grand Rapids Community College Mathematics Department is pleased to announce that it will host its next Mathematics Seminar on Thursday, December 10, 3:00-4:15 PM in 103 Cook. Our speaker, GRCC student Grant Jenkins, will discuss applications of Graph Theory. The title and abstract of his talk are below.

Grant’s seminar should be of interest to a wide cross-section of the college community. There will be cool mathematics with applications to romance and personal choice – what a combination! Very little background in mathematics is required, and everyone is welcome to attend.

Pop and cookies will be served at 2:45 PM.

The Stable Marriage Problem: An Intersection of Social Choice and Mathematics

The problem: Imagine that we are playing matchmaker. We have 10 male clients and 10 female clients who wish to be matched with someone of the opposite sex. Each of the 20 clients gives us a list of rankings of who they wish to be matched with. How do we use these lists to arrange 10 happy marriages?

This talk will rely on a field of mathematics called graph theory to match together people based upon a list of preferences.   We aim to create a “stable marriage” in order to cater to as many individuals’ preferences as possible. This is accomplished with the Gale-Shapely Algorithm, which allows us to identify a definitive set of matchings. In reality, peoples’ rankings of each other – preferences – are not always strict and sometimes include indifferences. In this case, we can extend Gale-Shapely to find matchings. This introduces many new classifications of stability and gives us a glimpse into interactions between social choice and mathematics.