What do swarm robotics and political redistricting have in common? One answer is Markov chains, which have recently been used in very different ways to address problems in both these […]
Knotting in living organisms is a feature that is visible to the careful observer of biological life. Since the 1970’s, with the increasing power of electron microscopes, scientists have been able […]
Many problems, arising in discrete and metric geometry, signal processing, physics, etc, can be reformulated as questions of optimizing discrete or continuous measures. We shall review some of such conjectures, […]
Opioid addiction has become a national health crisis in recent years, with involvement in 66% of all drug overdose deaths in 2016 and high economic costs. In contrast to the […]
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 […]
David Hilbert's Grundlagen der Geometrie is a rare example of a historical mathematics text that is still profitably read today and continues to inspire research in mathematics, computer science, and philosophy. The […]
In this talk, I'll attempt to give an introduction to the beautiful world of tropical geometry. As an application, I'll describe work with Siddarth Kannan (Pomona 2018) and Shiyue Li (Mudd […]
