I will give a brief introduction to well-rounded lattices and to their utility in wireless communications and post-quantum security. We will see how the lattice theta series naturally arises in these contexts and discuss its connections to well-rounded lattices. The talk is based on joint work with Laia Amoros, Amaro Barreal, Taoufiq Damir, Oliver Gnilke, […]

In late March, students, staff, and faculty were invited to help collaboratively build a large-scale geometric sculpture on the campus of Harvey Mudd College, demonstrating a relationship between truncated octahedra and rhombic dodecahedra, which are two examples of space-filling polyhedra. I’ll talk about the process of designing and building the sculpture, some geometry and combinatorics […]

The famous primitive element theorem states that every number field K is of the form Q(a) for some element a in K, called a primitive element. In fact, it is clear from the proof of this theorem that not only there are infinitely many such primitive elements in K, but in fact most elements in […]

Imagine the hands on a clock.  For every complete the minute hand makes, the seconds hand makes 60, while the hour hand only goes one twelfth of the way.   We may think of the hour hand as generating a group such that when we ``move'' twelve times then we get back to where we […]

For a finite group G, a G-module M, and a field F, an element u in H^d(G,M) is negligible over F if for each field extension L/F and every continuous group homomorphism from Gal(L^{sep}/L) to G, u is in the kernel of the induced homomorphism H^d(G,M) to H^d(L,M). Negligible cohomology was first introduced by Serre […]