• Niebrzydowski tribrackets and algebras (Sam Nelson, CMC)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    In this talk we will survey recent work on Niebzydowski Tribrackets and Niebrydowski Algebras, algebraic structures related to region colorings the planar complements of knots and trivalent spatial graphs.

  • Discrete compressed sensing: lattices and frames (Josiah Park, Georgia Tech)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Lattice valued vector systems have taken an important role in packing, coding, cryptography, and signal processing problems.  In compressed sensing, improvements in sparse recovery methods can be reached with an additional  assumption that the signal of  interest is lattice  valued, as demonstrated by A.  Flinth  and G. Kutyniok. Equiangular  tight  frames are  particular systems  of […]

  • Lattices from group frames and vertex transitive graphs (Lenny Fukshansky, CMC)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Tight frames in Euclidean spaces are widely used convenient generalizations of orthonormal bases. A particularly nice class of such frames is generated as orbits under irreducible actions of finite groups of orthogonal matrices: these are called irreducible group frames. Integer spans of rational irreducible group frames form Euclidean lattices with some very nice geometric properties, […]

  • Subgraph statistics (Benny Sudakov, ETH Zurich)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    Given integers $k,l$  and a graph $G$, how large can be the fraction of $k$-vertex subsets of $G$ which span exactly $l$ edges?  The systematic study of this very natural  question  was recently initiated by Alon, Hefetz, Krivelevich and Tyomkyn who also proposed several interesting conjectures on this topic. In this talk we discuss a theorem […]

  • Knowledge, strategies, and know-how (Pavel Naumov, CMC)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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 […]

  • When is the product of Siegel eigenforms an eigenform? (Jim Brown, Occidental College)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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 […]

  • Nonvanishing minors and uncertainty principles for Fourier analysis over finite fields (Daniel Katz, CSUN)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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 […]

  • Indiana Pols Forced to Eat Humble Pi: The Curious History of an Irrational Number (Edray Goins, Pomona)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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 […]

  • Refinements of metrics (Wai Yan Pong, CSUDH)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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 […]

  • Fibonacci and Lucas analogues of binomial coefficients and what they count (Curtis Bennett, CSULB)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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 […]

  • Matrix multiplication: the hunt for $\omega$ (Mark Huber, CMC)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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, […]

  • Chow rings of heavy/light Hassett spaces via tropical geometry (Dagan Karp, HMC)

    Millikan 2099, Pomona College 610 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA, United States

    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.