"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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Given a prime p, let P(t) be a non-constant monic polynomial in t over the ring of p-adic integers. Let X(n) be an n x n uniformly random (0,1)-matrix over […]
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 […]
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 […]
