Geremías Polanco Encarnación

Assistant Professor of Mathematics

Natural Science

gpeNS@hampshire.edu

Mail Code NS

Geremias Polanco Encarnacion

Cole Science Center

413.549.4600

On Leave of Absence Fall 2019, Spring 2020

Geremías Polanco Encarnación, assistant professor of mathematics, holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and an M.S. in actuarial science. Prior to Hampshire, he was a visiting assistant professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

His passion is to understand and communicate mathematics. His primary interest is analytic number theory, but this has led him also into the kindred area of algebraic combinatorics. The topics he is most involved with so far are related to Sturmian and Beatty sequences, uniform distribution, spectra in general, continued fractions, combinatorial sequences, and L-functions. He is interested in expanding his research work to other areas of mathematics and to interdisciplinary collaborative research.

Recent and Upcoming Courses

Math to Survive in the World
Many factors determine whether or not you get a job, succeed or fail in a project, and loose or make money on an investment. Your problem-solving ability is one of them, but understanding the principles behind the situation you face (in practice or in theory) is one of the most fundamental. To survive in the world, people need to apply countless mathematical principles, consciously or unconsciously. In this course you will understand some of the mathematical principles that you already use, and will learn some other new ones. Topics will include minimizing time required to complete certain tasks; scheduling and critical path analysis; fair division; voting theory; coding theory; mathematics of investment and credit; art, beauty and math; and other topics at our discretion
Probability Theory
We will move from Wall Street to the North Pole, with a stop at the Hospital and a little break at the Casinos. Because from financial markets to meteorology, sports projections to medical testing, and scientific studies to gambling, probability and statistics are fundamental to analyzing data and making predictions that are scientifically sound. They are invaluable tools for any subject of study in any of the sciences. In this introductory course to probability we will cover topics that include the calculus of probability, combinatorial analysis, random variables, expectation, distribution functions, moment-generating functions, central limit theorem and joint distributions. Computers will be used throughout. Problem sets will be assigned for almost every class.