Splash Biography

Everyone's heard the name of the basic conic sections: circle, ellipse, hyperbola, and parabola. But why are they special? Where do they turn up? We'll take a windy path through many different areas of math to investigate them, seeing areas as diverse as the dynamics of a game of billiards to the amazing fact that five points in the plane determine a unique conic section.

We'll talk a little bit about information theory (what is information? how can we measure information?) and then talk about error-correcting codes. We'll have lots of examples and even talk a little about the history of this mathematics.