2025 Kossack Exam

About This Exam:

The 2025 Kossack Exam is a two hour exam that will be held March 29, 2025 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM.  We will not allow calculators on this year's test.

The exam is based on the standard topics in MATH 2250-2260, but not including sequences, series, or vectors.  The awards for the top three finishers will consist of certificates and modest cash prizes (totaling about $300), to be presented at the Mathematics Department Awards Day on April 16, 2025.

2025 Cantrell Lecture 2

The Riemann zeta function and the Riemann hypothesis

In Talk 1, we learned about some strange patterns in the prime numbers.  In this talk, we try to explain where these strange patterns come from.  This leads us to the Riemann zeta function.  
We also introduce an important open question called the Riemann hypothesis, and discuss how it relates to prime numbers and why it is hard to prove.