An agent comes to a fork in a road. There is a sign that says that one of the two roads leads to prosperity and another to death. The agent must take the fork, but she does not know which road leads where. Does the agent have a strategy to get to prosperity? On one […]
Modular forms are ubiquitous in modern number theory. For instance, showing that elliptic curves are secretly modular forms was the key to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In addition to number theory, modular forms show up in diverse areas such as coding theory and particle physics. Roughly speaking, a modular form is a complex-valued […]
Chebotarev's theorem on roots of unity says that every minor of a discrete Fourier transform matrix of prime order is nonzero. We present a generalization of this result that includes analogues for discrete cosine and discrete sine transform matrices as special cases. This leads to a generalization of the Biro-Meshulam-Tao uncertainty principle to functions with […]
In 1897, Indiana physician Edwin J. Goodwin believed he had discovered a way to square the circle, and proposed a bill to Indiana Representative Taylor I. Record which would secure Indiana's the claim to fame for his discovery. About the time the debate about the bill concluded, Purdue University professor Clarence A. Waldo serendipitously came […]
I will talk about a few graph-theoretic metrics then introduce the concept of refinements on a class of functions that include all metrics. As a case study, we will construct various refinements on the shortest-path distance. Consequently, we obtain a few "better" versions of the Erdos number. In the course of our investigation, we realized various construction […]
A Fibonomial is what is obtained when you replace each term of the binomial coefficients $ {n \choose k}$ by the corresponding Fibonacci number. For example, the Fibonomial $${ 6\brace 3 } = \frac{F_6 \cdot F_5 \cdot \dots \cdot F_1}{(F_3\cdot F_2 \cdot F_1)(F_3\cdot F_2 \cdot F_1)} = \frac{8\cdot5\cdot3\cdot2\cdot1\cdot1}{(2\cdot1\cdot1)(2\cdot1\cdot1)} = 60$$ since the first six Fibonacci […]
For centuries finding the determinant of a matrix was considered to be something that took $\Theta(n^3)$ steps. Only in 1969 did Strassen discover that there was a faster method. In this talk I'll discuss his finding, how the Master Theorem for divide-and-conquer plays into it, and how it was shown that finding determinants, inverting matrices, […]
In this talk, I will try to give a fun introduction to tropical geometry and Hassett spaces, and show how tropical geometry can be used to compute the Chow rings of Hassett spaces combinatorially. This is joint work with Siddarth Kannan and Shiyue Li.
A triple of natural numbers (a,b,c) is an S-set if a+b=c. I. Schur used the S-sets to show that for n >3, there exists s(n) such that for prime p […]
Augusta Ada Byron King Lovelace (1815-1852) is today celebrated as the first computer programmer in history. This might be confusing to some because in 1852 there were no machines that […]
One of the main drivers of current research in geometry is the classification of Calabi-Yau threefolds. Towards this effort, a particular approach in algebraic geometry is via the study of […]
The classical Frobenius problem asks for the largest integer not representable as a non-negative integer linear combination of a relatively prime integer n-tuple. This problem and its various generalizations have […]
