Open Learning - Maxwell's Equations - Partial Differential Equations Talk

This event is not at our regular time or location!

We are meeting on Thursday at 7PM (instead of our regular 6PM start time!) Please factor that in to your dinner and attendance plans. We are meeting at the Rockville Science Center Storefront (across the street from Buffalo Wild Wings), and not in the makerspace or library. We also have a virtual join link if you prefer, but attending in person is strongly encouraged.

We are partnering with the Numberphiles math club for this event - https://www.rockvillesciencecenter.org/numberphiles

Join us as we explore the calculus describing light - classical electrodynamics. Maxwell's Equations informed later developments in relativistic field theory and quantum theory. This is very exciting for us. Last week we discussed these equations conceptually; this talk will explore them in detail and the theory behind them.

MoCo Maker member Adam Mendenhall will be presenting the mathematics of Maxwell's Equations - with a particular focus on partial differential equations! Adam is a computer programmer based in Rockville, MD. He has worked on astronomical surveys, control algorithms for laser systems, and optical microscope firmware. His background in math includes analytic number theory and studying the Keller-Segel equations on manifolds, topics which are adjacent to Maxwell's equations.

It's fair to call this an advanced talk, but all backgrounds and skill levels are encouraged to attend anyways! What's the worst that happens, you learn something? In any case we'll build on the mathematical framework of this talk for future projects we are a planning in the area of light, optics, and light sensors.

Join us for a mathematical introduction to key math principals, and a break down of the mathematical interpretations of each various equation. Lastly, we'll see an application of the equations to a practical engineering scenario to show how these concepts propagate forward into systems design concepts.

If you are curious on our past talk on Maxwell's Equations, you can see the background materials we covered here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXWOMkNEeTOMpFQGvcxhgCuck2WaDodDtsK0DygK1FM/edit?usp=sharing

This will be a fun and academic session, followed by a social hour after the scheduled event. Join us for one or both of those!

This is a hybrid event and an event link + room number will be shared closer to the event.