SFU Operations Research Seminars: Amzi Jeffs
Date
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Topic
Applying Sunflowers of Convex Sets to the Study of Neural Codes
Speakers
Details
Motivated by neuroscience phenomena, the study of convex neural codes seeks to characterize how convex sets may intersect and overlap one another in Euclidean space. We will see how certain arrangements of convex sets, called "sunflowers" and "flexible sunflowers", can help answer this question. In particular, we will describe a new Helly-type theorem that constrains these arrangements, and highlight several surprising applications to the theory of convex neural codes. We will briefly contextualize these results by examining minors of codes, a framework that is somewhat analogous to minors of graphs.