University of Washington

We prove a new signed elementary symmetric function expansion of the chromatic symmetric function. We then use sign-reversing involutions to prove e -positivity for graphs formed by joining cycles or cliques at single vertices. By considering...

Richard Stanley asked in 1995 whether a tree is determined up to isomorphism by its chromatic symmetric function. This question remains unanswered and frequently keeps the speaker awake at night. Our approach to understanding the strength of the...

The central question of knot theory is that of distinguishing links up to isotopy. The first polynomial invariant of links devised to help answer this question was the Alexander polynomial (1928). Almost a century after its introduction, it still...

We consider the Grassmannian G r C ( k , n ) , a manifold parameterized by k -dimensional planes in complex n -dimensional space. The Schubert decomposition of the Grassmannian is perhaps the classic way to split this space into smaller pieces...

Quivers and their mutations play a fundamental role in the theory of cluster algebras. We focus on the problem of deciding whether two given quivers are mutation equivalent to each other. Our approach is based on introducing an additional structure...

Influential work of Hodge from the 1940s led the way in using Gröbner bases to combinatorially study the Grassmannian. In this talk, we will follow Hodge's approach in order to investigate certain subvarieties called positroid varieties. Positroid...

In a seminal paper, Kannan and Lovász (1988) considered a quantity µ K L ( Λ , K ) which denotes the best volume-based lower bound on the covering radius µ ( Λ , K ) of a convex body K with respect to a lattice Λ . Kannan and Lovász proved that µ ( Λ...

The computer is taking over. AND, in many branches of applied mathematics and statistics we hear 'why bother to prove theorems? simulations and numerical approximation are easier and better for real problems'. NOT SO FAST; I will present a collection...

Optimal transport operates on empirical distributions which may contain acquisition artifacts, such as outliers or noise, thereby hindering a robust calculation of the OT map. Additionally, it necessitates equal mass between the two distributions...

We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function under convex constraints, where some or all of the decision variables are constrained to be integer, with access to first-order oracles for the objective function and separation oracles for the...