Math Appreciation Week Keynote Speaker: Dr. Peter J. Mucha

Title: "Lassos and Logarithms: How Mathematics Finds Needles in Omics Haystacks" Abstract: Modern medicine has ever-increasing access to a variety of different "omics" technologies: we can measure genes (genomics), RNA (transcriptomics), proteins (proteomics), small molecules (metabolomics), and microbes (meta-omics)-math that are present in different parts of the body. These capabilities promise enormous opportunities for improving the detection and treatment of a wide variety of medical conditions, but they generate large, complicated data sets that need to be analyzed carefully. On the one hand, in most applications we hope to find a signal that is "sparse" in the sense that it only depends on a (hopefully very) small part of the data. On the other hand, many such data sets are "compositional" in that they only convey relative counts. Detecting sparse signals and performing compositional data analysis are each well-studied areas, but combining them remains an active area of research. In this talk, we will describe how mathematics is essential for unlocking the potential of such omics data sets. No prior knowledge of mathematics or medicine will be assumed. If you remember what a logarithm is, that's great; but if you don't, we'll tell you what you need to know. (Talk supported by The Class of 1902 Lecture Fund)