The slice rank polynomial method, motivated by groundbreaking work of Croot, Lev and Pach and refined by Tao, has opened the door to the resolution of many problems in extremal combinatorics. We survey these results and discuss contributions in several of the speaker's recent papers.
Given a lattice L, an extension of L is a lattice M of strictly greater rank so that L is equal to the intersection of the subspace spanned by L with M. In this talk, we will discus constructions of such lattice extensions with particular geometric invariants of M, such as the determinant, covering radius […]
Markov chains have become widely-used to generate random political districting plans. These random districting plans can be used to form a baseline for comparison, and any proposed districting plans that differ significantly from this baseline can be flagged as potentially gerrymandered. However, very little is rigorously known about these Markov chains - Are they irreducible? […]
"A Tale of Two Cities" is a novel told in three books/parts. Here we describe three projects related both to published work and ongoing pieces: PROJECT 1: In the world of combinatorics, parking functions are combinatorial objects arising from the situation of parking cars under a parking strategy. In this part of the talk, we […]
Given a degree d polynomial f(x) in Q, consider the subset S_f of Q consisting of rational numbers t for which the translated polynomial f(x) - t factors completely in Q. For example, if f is linear or quadratic then S_f is always infinite, but if degree of f is at least 3, then interesting […]
The Mahler measure of a polynomial is the modulus of its leading term multiplied by the moduli of all roots outside the unit circle. The Mahler measure of an algebraic number b, M(b) is the Mahler measure of its minimal polynomial. By a result of Kronecker, an algebraic number b satisfies M(b)=1 if and only […]
Young diagrams are all possible arrangements of n boxes into rows and columns, with the number of boxes in each subsequent row weakly decreasing. For a partition λ of n, a standard Young tableau S of shape λ is built from the Young diagram of shape λ by filling it with the numbers 1 to […]
Let L be a full-rank lattice in R^n and write L+ for the semigroup of all vectors with nonnegative coordinates in L. We call a basis X for L positive if it is contained in L+. There are infinitely many such bases, and each of them spans a conical semigroup S(X) consisting of all nonnegative […]
Many knot invariants are defined from features of knot projections such as arcs or crossings. Gauss diagrams provide an alternative combinatorial scheme for representing knots. In this talk we will use Gauss diagrams to enhance the biquandle counting invariant for classical and virual knots using biquandle arrow weights, a new algebraic structure without a clear […]
There are two different measures of how far a given Euclidean lattice is from being orthogonal -- the orthogonality defect and the average coherence. The first of these comes from the study of sphere packing while the second is motivated by frame theory, but both of them have applications in digital communications, especially in coding […]
Consider rational polynomials in multiple variables that are linear with respect to some of the variables. In this talk we discuss the problem of finding a zero of such polynomials that are bounded with respect to a height function. For a system of such polynomials satisfying certain technical conditions we prove the existence of a […]
In this talk we will consider some notions of `robustness' of graph/hypergraph properties. We will survey some existing results and will try to emphasize the following new result (joint with Adva Mond and Kaarel Haenni): The binomial random digraph $D_{n,p}$ typically contains the minimum between the minimum out- and in-degrees many edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles, given […]
