Monday, February 9, 2026

Spring 2026

From arstexnica

12 and 19 February

Mohammad Sayeh

Nobel AI


Mike Sullivan shares with you two books that he read on the history of AI/machine learning:

  • What is ChatGPT Doing …and Why Does it Work (by Stephen Wolfram)
  • Why Machines Learn (by Anil Ananthaswamy)
(From Mohammad: see also Hopfield's early work:  1982Hopfield ,  1984Hopfield1985Hopfield1986Hopfield ).

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Spring 2026


5 February

Ronald White

An introduction to non-associative algebra

Abstract:   In this talk, we begin by introducing some of the more common non-associative operations and showing how we use them in everyday contexts. We then move into algebraic structures, starting with a magma, a set that is simply closed under a single binary operation. From there, we gradually impose additional structure until we arrive at loops, which can be thought of as groups that are not necessarily associative. This is where we will spend the remainder of our time, exploring what these structures contribute to our understanding of groups and what questions we can study about them in their own right.