### CONTACT INFO

OFFICE 711 (7TH FLOOR), THACKERAY HALL
E-MAIL: lupucezar@gmail.com, cel47@pitt.edu

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## Recent and upcoming conferences, workshops, seminar talks, summer schools and other related mathematical activities

Program                                              Abstract book                                    Presenters

Talk: to be announced!

Instructor: Topics in algebra and number theory (algebraic integers, advanced analytic techniques in number theory), Euclidian geometry and beyond (geometric & trigonometric inequalities), elementary real analysis (sequences and series of real numbers, applications of derivatives and integrals)

Seminar talk:  Euler’s formula for Apery’s constant $\zeta(3)$

Talk: Analytic aspects in the evaluation of some multiple zeta values and multiple Hurwitz zeta values (abstract, slides)

Talk: Analytic aspects in the evaluation of some multiple zeta values and multiple Hurwitz zeta values (abstract, slides)

Talk: Analytic aspects in the evaluation of some multiple zeta values (abstract, slides)

## Information on the Advanced Calculus II-MATH 1540 (graduate), Spring 2017

This Spring, I shall be the recitation instructor for the Advanced Calculus II (MATH 1540-graduate version). This course is designed to prepare the 1st and 2nd year graduate students for the Preliminary examination in real analysis. This exam is offered twice a year (May and August) by the department. My teaching page is the following: https://lupucezar.wordpress.com/teaching/.

•   Homework (30% of your final grade!) will be assigned and collected weekly by Dr. DeBlois and you can find it on his webpage here. The homework will be graded and returned the following week. Late homework is accepted only with the instructor’s permission.
•  The homework assigned last Spring’16 semester by Dr. Xu and me were the following:
•  I encourage you to solve as many problems as you can from this last year’s homework. All of them have the same caliber as prelim problems from previous years.
•  Moreover, I shall assign four WORKSHEETS for this semester as follows:
1.  LINEAR MAPS, LIMITS, CONTINUITY AND DIFFERENTIABILITY OF FUNCTIONS OF SEVERAL VARIABLES.
2.  THE INVERSE AND IMPLICIT FUNCTION THEOREMS; EXTREMUM PROBLEMS AND RELATED TOPICS.
3.  INTEGRAL CALCULUS FOR FUNCTIONS OF SEVERAL VARIABLES.
4.  LEBESGUE INTEGRATION AND SETS OF MEASURE ZERO.
• My office hours are Tuesday (5-6 PM) & Wednesday (12-2 PM) in the POSVAR LAB and Tuesday (6-7 PM) in the MAC. My office is Thackeray 711.
• I invite you to join our Facebook group. The purpose of this group is to discuss problems from your homework or from previous preliminary exams. Moreover, I shall also post some notes from the recitation as a substitute for review sessions. Maybe, from time to time I shall upload some videos with solved prelim-type problems.
• Last but not least, you should also start working on problems from the famous Berkeley Problems in Mathematics by  P. Ney de Souza and J-N. Silva. This book is a must for every graduate student! If you feel discouraged by the difficulty of the problems in the book, please remember to take into account Polya’s advice on how to approach a problem. Other resources can be found on my teaching page (look for Advanced Calculus-undergraduate & graduate 2014, 2015, 2016).

## The 2017 Joint Mathematics Meeting of the AMS and MAA

The 2017 Joint Mathematics Meeting of the American Mathematical Society and Mathematical Association of America is the largest mathematics meeting in the world. More than 6000 mathematicians and math enthusiasts met in the beautiful city of Atlanta, GA between January 4-7. The locations were Marriott Marquis and Hyatt Regency. This is the 100th annual winter meeting of MAA and the 123rd annual meeting of AMS. My talk is part of the AMS Contributed Paper Session on Number Theory, III , Friday January 6, 2017, 1:00 p.m.-4:55 p.m at the International 1, International Level, Marriott Marquis.

Abstract book                                     Program                                      Presenters

## The 2016 William Lowell Putnam Competition Exam at the University of Pittsburgh

The 77th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition took place on December 5th in 705 Thackeray Hall. Eight Pitt students had the mission of solving the challenging Putnam problem sets. As usual, there were two sessions of 6 problems each. The official Pitt Team members were Alex Mang, Andrew Tindall and Jack Hafer. Other participating students were: Matthew Gerstbrein, Terry Tan, Andrew Klang, Tianke Li and Haoming Yan. Below one can find this year’s Putnam problems. Congratulations to all participants!

SESSION A:

Problem A1. Find the smallest positive integer $j$ such that for every polynomial $p(x)$ with integer coefficients and for every integer $k,$ the integer

$\displaystyle p^{(j)}(k)=\left. \frac{d^j}{dx^j}p(x) \right|_{x=k}$

(the $j$-th derivative of $p(x)$ at $k$) is divisible by $2016.$

Problem A2. Given a positive integer $n$, let $M(n)$ be the largest integer $m$ such that

$\displaystyle \binom{m}{n-1}>\binom{m-1}{n}$.

Evaluate

$\displaystyle\lim_{n\to\infty}\frac{M(n)}{n}$.

Problem A3. Suppose that $f$ is a function from $\mathbb{R}$ to $\mathbb{R}$ such that

$\displaystyle f(x)+f\left(1-\frac{1}{x}\right)=\arctan x$

for real $x\neq 0$. (As usual, $y=\arctan x$ means $-\frac{\pi}{2} and $\tan y=x$).

Find

$\displaystyle \int_0^1f(x)dx$.

Problem A4. Consider a $(2m-1)\times(2n-1)$ rectangular region, where $m$ and $n$ are integers such that $m,n\ge 4.$ The region is to be tiled using tiles of the two types shown:

(The dotted lines divide the tiles into $1\times 1$ squares.) The tiles may be rotated and reflected, as long as their sides are parallel to the sides of the rectangular region. They must all fit within the region, and they must cover it completely without overlapping.

What is the minimum number of tiles required to tile the region?

Problem A5. Suppose that $G$ is a finite group generated by the two elements $g$ and $h$, where the order of $g$ is odd. Show that every element of $G$ can be written in the form

$\displaystyle g^{m_{1}}h^{n_{1}} g^{m_{2}}h^{n_{2}}\ldots g^{m_{r}}h^{n_{r}}$

with $1\leq r\leq |G|$ and $m_{1}, n_{1}, m_{2}, n_{2}, \ldots m_{r}, n_{r}\in \{1, -1\}$. (Here $|G|$ is the number of elements of $G$.)

Problem A6. Find the smallest constant $C$ such that every real polynomial $P(x)$ of degree $3$ that has a root in the interval $[0, 1]$,

$\displaystyle \int_0^1|P(x)|dx\leq C\cdot\max_{x\in [0,1]}|P(x)|$.

SESSION B:

Problem B1. Let $x_{0}, x_{1}, \ldots, x_{n}, \ldots$ be the sequence such that $x_{0}=1$ and for $n\geq 0$,

$\displaystyle x_{n+1}=ln(e^{x_{n}}-x_{n})$.

(as usual, the function $ln$ is the natural logarithm). Show that the infinite series

$\displaystyle x_{0}+x_{1}+x_{2}+\ldots$

converges and find its sum.

Problem B2. Define a positive integer $n$ to be squarish if either $n$ is itself a perfect square of the distance from $n$ to the nearest perfect square is a perfect square. For example, $2016$ is squarish, because the nearest perfect square to $2016$ is $45^2=2025$ and $2025-2016=9$ is a perfect square. (of the positive integers between $1$ and $10$, only $6$ and $7$ are not squarish.) For a positive integer $N$, let $S(N)$ be the number of squarish between $1$ and $N$ inclusive. Find positive constants $\alpha$ and $\beta$ such that

$\displaystyle\lim_{N\to\infty}\frac{S(N)}{N^{\alpha}}=\beta$,

or show that no such constants exist.

Problem B3. Suppose that $S$ is a finite set of points in the plane such that the area of the triangle $\Delta ABC$ is at most $1$ whenever $A, B$ and $C$ are in $S$. Show that there exists a triangle of area $4$ that (together with its interior) covers the set $S$.

Problem B4. Let $A$ be a $2n\times 2n$ matrix, with entries choasen indepedently at random. Every entry is chosen to be $0$ or $1$, each with probability $\frac{1}{2}$. Find the expected value of $\det(A-A^{t})$ (as a function of $n$), where $A^{t}$ is the transpose of $A$.

Problem B5. Find all functions $f$ from the interval $(1, \infty)$ to $(1, \infty)$ with the following property:

if $x, y\in (1, \infty)$ and $x^2\leq y\leq x^3$, then $(f(x))^2\leq f(y)\leq (f(x)^3$.

Problem B6. Evaluate

$\displaystyle \sum_{k=1}^{\infty}\frac{(-1)^{k-1}}{k}\cdot\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k2^n+1}$.

OFFICIAL SOLUTIONS:

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## NEAM-1st Northeastern Analysis Meeting, October 14-16, 2016, Brockport, NY, USA

The 1st Northeastern Analysis Meeting (NEAM 1) took place at the SUNY-College at Brockport, Brockport, NY between 14-16 October. More than 80 mathematicians affiliated with universities all around the world participated at the meeting.
The conference was organized by Gabriel Prajitura and Ruhan Zhao of SUNY-College at Brockport and it included special sessions on Fluid Dynamics and Dynamical Systems as well as 4 contributed sections. Although, the contributed sections involved more operator theory, it featured many other fields such as PDEs, number theory, combinatorics and probability. My talk is part of the  Contributed Section IV , Saturday October 15, 2016, 3:05 p.m.-3:25 p.m. in Edwards Hall 106. More details about the conference including the abstract of the talks are given below:

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## The 2016 Putnam seminar, Fall 2016, University of Pittsburgh

Information about the competition and seminar (course description)

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is the premiere competition for undergraduate students in North America. More than 500 universities compete in this contest organized by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).  The competition takes place in the FIRST Saturday of December. This year’s Putnam competition will be held on Saturday, December 3 in Thackeray 703 or 705, from 10.00 am-1.00 pm and 3.00 pm-6.00 pm. The test is supervised by faculty members of each participating school. Every problem is graded on a scale of 0-10. The problems are usually listed in increasing order of difficulty, with A1 and B1 the easisest, and A6 and B6 the hardest. Top 5 scoring students on the Putnam exam are named Putnam Fellows. A student can take this exam maximum four times and the Putnam official team of the university consists of 3 members.
The purpose of this class is to provide a comprehensive introduction into the world of problem solving in different branches of mathematics such as: real & complex analysis, linear algebra, abstract algebra, combinatorics, probability, geometry and trigonometry and number theory.
The teaching style will be a mixture of a lecture and a problem-solving session. By the end of this course, students should develop fundamental problem solving skills, and become accustomed to concentrating on a problem for an extended period of time. Indeed, this seminar concentrates on the raw creative problem-solving skills which can serve as an essential ingredient in almost every field of activity.  On the other hand, starting this Fall, the Putnam seminar has honors designation.
Last year, Pitt official Team ranked 24th in the nation and this marks the best performance since 2002. More details about this can be found here and here.

Course number, lecturers and webpage
Schedule and locations

• Tuesday, 5.15-7.00 PM in Thackeray Hall, room 427

This is a lecture given by the instructor on a certain topic. The students will learn different concepts and techniques. Moreover, the lecturer will also present solutions of some problems and will assign other problems as homework for the students.

• Thursday, 5.15-7.00 PM in Thackeray Hall, room 703

This is more like a recitation rather than a lecture. The students will meet and discuss with the coordinators the problems assigned by the lecturer as homework.

Detailed program (lectures & recitations)

Week 1. What is Putnam competition? Organizational meeting

Abstract: This is an introduction to the seminar and the competition itself. There will be discussed training techniques for a competition of this caliber.

Lecturers: George Sparling & Cezar Lupu
Date: September 8

Week 2. (Elementary) Algebra

Abstract: This seminar will cover problems on topics such as algebraic identities and inequalities as well as polynomials in one variable.

Lecturer: Cezar Lupu
Date: September 13

Recitation instructor: Cezar Lupu
Date: September 15

Week 3. Real Analysis I

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as sequences of real numbers, convergence, limits and series of real numbers.

Lecturer: Cezar Lupu
Date: September 20

Recitation instructor: Cezar Lupu
Date: September 22

Week 4. Geometry and Trigonometry

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as vectors, conics, quadratics, and other curves in the plane as well as trigonometric formulae.

Lecturer: Derek Orr
Date: September 27

Recitation instructors: George Sparling & Cezar Lupu
Date: September 29

Week 5. Abstract Algebra

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as groups, rings, and finite fields.

Lecturer: George Sparling
Date: October 4

Recitation instructor: George Sparling
Date: October 6

Week 6. Real Analysis II

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as continuity and differentiability of functions of single variable.

Lecturer: Roxana Popescu
Date: October 11

Recitation instructors: George Sparling & Cezar Lupu
Date: October 13

Week 7. Linear Algebra I (video)

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as matrices and determinants.

Lecturer: Cezar Lupu
Date: October 18

Recitation instructors: George Sparling & Cezar Lupu
Date: October 20

Week 8. Number Theory I

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as arithmetic of numbers, prime numbers and diophantine equations.

Lecturer: Thomas Hales
Date: October 25

Recitation instructor: George Sparling
Date: October 27

Week 9. Number Theory II

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as arithmetic functions and quadratic residues.

Lecturer: Thomas Hales
Date: November 1

Recitation instructor: George Sparling
Date: November 3

Week 10. Real Analysis III (video)

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as Riemann sums and integrals.

Lecturer: Cezar Lupu
Date: November 8

Special lecture! Generating Functions and Applications

Lecturer: Vlad Matei (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Date: November 10

Week 11. Linear Algebra II

Abstract: This will cover problems on topics such as vector spaces, linear transformations, characteristic polynomial, eigenvalues  and eigenvectors.

Lecturer: Cezar Lupu
Date: November 15

Recitation instructors: George Sparling & Cezar Lupu
Date: November 17

Week 12. Thanksgiving break!

Abstract: No seminar this week!

Date: November 22 & 24

Week 13. Real Analysis IV (video)

Abstract: This will cover problems on special topics in analysis and beyond.

Lecturer: Cezar Lupu
Date: November 29

Special lecture! Problems with similar ideas in Integral Calculus (video)

Lecturer: Cezar Lupu
Date: December 1

Putnam’16 squad

## Overview of the course CALCULUS III (MATH 0240), Summer 2016, University of Pittsburgh

This Summer I shall be teaching CALCULUS III (MATH 0240) in the mathematics department at University of Pittsburgh. Mainly, we shall cover vectors, vector functions and space functions, arc length and curvature, functions of several variables, double and triple integrals, line integrals, surface integrals and some other related topics.

About the course

This is the third sequence of three calculus courses for science and engineering students. The goal is to prepare you to make use of calculus as a practical problem-solving tool.

Prerequisite

Math 0230 or equivalent, with grade of C or better.

Lectures and Recitations

• Lectures are from Monday to Thursday, 7-8.45 PM  in 704 Thackeray Hall.
• Recitations are from Monday to Thursday, 6-6.50 PM  in 704 Thackeray Hall. The recitation instructor for this class is Fawwaz Battayneh. His office hours are Monday and Thursday, 12-1 PM in the MAC.
• Moreover, you can also check the regular teaching page for this class: https://lupucezar.wordpress.com/teaching/ (Calculus 3-Summer 2016).
• Quizzes and exams will appear on the teaching section above.

Office Hours

My office hours are from Monday to Thursday, 5-6 PM in the MAC. If you want to schedule an additional meeting with me in my office (Thackeray hall, room 415) do not hesitate to send me an e-mail to lupucezar@gmail.com.

References (Lecture notes, textbook, and practice exams)

1. P. Hajlasz, Lecture Notes in Calculus III, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
2. J. Stewart, Essential Calculus, Early Transcendentals, 2nd edition.
3. A. Athanas, Calculus 3-practice exams.
4. I. Sysoeva, Calculus 3-practice exams.
5. E. Trofimov, Calculus 3-webpage.
6. A. Yarosh, Calculus 3-webpage.

Grades

Your final grade will be determined as follows:

• Homework: 20% (2 homeworks of 10% each)
• Quizzes: 20% (4 quizzes of 5% each)
• Two exams: 60% (2 exams of 30% each)
• LON CAPA homework: 5% (extra credit)

Homework

I shall assign two homeworks which will appear on the teaching section. The first homework is hereEach one will be due before the exams. Additionally, one can do problems from the LON CAPA system. If you find it really annoying, you can also do this.

Final Grade Policy

A: 90-100%, A-: 85-90%, B+: 80-85%, B: 75-80%, B-: 70-75%, C+: 65-70%, C: 60-65%.

Exam Dates

The first exam will be on Thursday, July 14th, 7-9 PM in Thackeray 704.

The second exam will be on Wednesday, August 3rd, 7-9 PM in Thackeray 704.

Disability Resource Services

If you have any disability for which you are or may be requesting an accomodation, you are encouraged to contact both your instructor and the Office of Disability and Services, 216 William Pitt Union (412) 624-7890 as early as possible in the term.

The integral formula in spherical coordinates system

Fubini’s theorem

Green’s theorem