Algebra / Number Theory / Combinatorics Seminar

Given votes for candidates, what is the best way to determine the winner of the election, if some of the votes have been corrupted or miscounted?  As we saw in Florida in 2000, where a difference of 537 votes determined the president of the United States, the electoral college system does not seem to be […]

Discrete Calculus studies discrete structures, such as sequences and graphs, using techniques similar to those used in Calculus for continuous functions. The basic idea of generating functions is to associate a function with a sequence so that the coefficients of the power series expansion of the function represent the terms of the sequence. They provide […]

It is elementary and well known that a nonzero polynomial in one variable of degree d with coefficients in a field F has at most d zeros in F. It is meaningful to ask similar questions for systems of several polynomials in several variables of a fixed degree, provided the base field F is finite. […]

We prove, in this joint work with Maksym Radziwill, a 1978 conjecture of S. Patterson (conditional on the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis) concerning the bias of cubic Gauss sums. This explains a well-known numerical bias in the distribution of cubic Gauss sums first observed by Kummer in 1846. One important byproduct of our proof is that […]