This talk discusses a puzzle called “Spinning Switches,” based on a problem popularized by Martin Gardner in his February 1979 column of “Mathematical Games". This puzzle can be generalized to a two-player game on a finite wreath products. This talk will provide a classification of several families of these generalized puzzles, including a full classification […]
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 […]
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 […]
"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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
