Colloquium

Title: Thinking Inside the Box: A combinatorial approach to Schubert Calculus Speaker: Sami H. Assaf, Department of Mathematics, University of Southern California Abstract: Given 2 lines in the plane, how many points lie on both? If we rule out the case where the two lines are the same, and we work in projective space so […]

Title: Equality Cases of Geometric Inequalities Speaker: Igor Pak, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles Abstract: Geometric inequalities go back to antiquity, and so do their equality cases.  As everyone knows, the circle is the only case when the isoperimetric inequality is sharp.  But what happens to other geometric inequalities?  Apparently, as the […]

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Title: What is a moduli space? Speaker: Javier Gonzalez Anaya, Department of Mathematics, Harvey Mudd College Abstract: A natural endeavour in mathematics is to classify objects according to their properties. For example, we can readily identify straight lines in the plane, or recognize different kinds of triangles depending on their symmetries. Less intuitive, however, is that […]

Title: Slope gap distributions of translation surfaces Speaker: Taylor McAdam, Department of Mathematics, Pomona College Abstract: How “random” are the rational numbers? To make sense of this question, let us consider the set of Farey fractions of level n—that is, the rational numbers between 0 and 1 with denominator at most n. It turns out that these distribute uniformly in the […]