The 23^rd Annual Spring Conference was held in South Lake Tahoe April 26-27, 2019 at Lake Tahoe Community College.

I will take you to two excursions around Laplacians, ubiquitous operators in mathematics, and their applications. The first excursion will show how the Laplace operator in rectangular domains in R^2 helps image compression such as the JPEG. The second excursion is to introduce the wonderful world of graphs and show what the Laplacians on graphs can do for many applications while paying attention to some dangerous slips.

This entertaining presentation takes a look at mathematical oddities, curious results, and humorous anecdotes that have been collected from books, friends, students, and colleagues over the past 30 years. The topics come from courses taught at the university, community college, and high school levels. Several topics are unique to my teaching experience and will not be universally known. Old and new technology, including Python code with documentation, will be used to analyze and solve some curious problems. While the presentation is intended to be entertaining, there are plenty of useful mathematical ideas presented throughout. Math stories will be shared that are often amazing, sometimes confounding, and many times just plain ridiculous.

Various problems involve maximizing/minimizing an integral between two fixed points. This can be done with the Euler-Lagrange equation. The E-L equation can be derived by analogy with directional-derivatives in a way that may be accessible to advanced community college students. The result is important in physics.

Schedule of the Saturday Concurrent Sessions

Room/Session	Session 1 9:00 am - 10:00 am	Session 2 10:30 am - 11:30 am	Session 3 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm	Session 4 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
A	Modular Knots With Optimization Carlo Séquin UC Berkeley Presentation	Mathematical Proof Todd CadwalladerOlsker CSU Fullerton Presentation	Combinatorics and Poker Deborah Frank College of Southern Nevada	Charles Dodgson Stan Isacs and Stuart Moskowitz College of San Mateo and Humboldt State University
B	Indian Mathematics and Contributions Dean Gooch Santa Rosa Junior College	Power Spectral Numbers Walter Kehowski Glendale Community College Presentation	The Pancake and Ham Sandwich Theorems Charles Barnett Las Positas College (retired) Presentation	The Dept. of Lower Mathematics Rick Luttmann Sonoma State University Presentation
C	Math Competition Problems Scott Annin and Steven Davis CSU Fullerton and Fullerton College	The Caliri Circles David Caliri Caliri Circles	No Session	No Session

Future CMC³ Conferences

Information about future conferences is available.