Algebra / Number Theory / Combinatorics Seminar

In 1846, Ernst Eduard Kummer conjectured a distribution of values of a cubic Gauss sum after computing a few values by hand.  This was forgotten about for nearly 100 years until John von Neumann and Herman Goldstine attempted to verify the conjecture as a way to test the new ENIAC machine in 1953.  They found […]

Combinatorial neural codes are 0/1 vectors that are used to model the co-firing patterns of a set of place cells in the brain. One wide-open problem in this area is to determine when a given code can be algorithmically drawn in the plane as a Venn diagram-like figure. A sufficient condition to do so is […]

The Bateman—Horn Conjecture is a far-reaching statement about the distribution of the prime numbers.  It implies many known results, such as the Green—Tao theorem, and a variety of famous conjectures, such as the Twin Prime Conjecture.  In this expository talk, we start from basic principles and provide a heuristic argument in favor of the conjecture. […]

Algebraic geometry (AG) is a major generalization of linear algebra which is fairly influential in mathematics. Since the 1980's with the development of computer algebra systems like Mathematica, AG has been leveraged in areas of STEM as diverse as statistics, robotic kinematics, computer science/geometric modeling, and mirror symmetry. Part one of my talk will be a […]